'Net Features : Twitter ads

Now Open: Twitter Self-Serve Ads

Allison Howen — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:30:00 GMT

After spending a year in limited release, Twitter has finally opened its self-service advertising program to the public.

This is not only big news for businesses who maintain an active presence on the micro-blogging social network, but also for businesses that are new to Twitter and professionals who are trying to grow their personal brand – as these ads improve a user’s visibility and can even help a business increase key metrics like conversions.

Twitter Self-Serve Ads 101

Twitter's self-service platform offers Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts as advertising formats. Both formats are labeled as “Promoted” when they appear on the social network so that users can easily identify them as paid advertisements. That said, all Promoted content is displayed next to regular content on a Twitter user’s newsfeed, which means that these ads don’t interrupt the user experience.

Promoted Tweets, for example, appear in the newsfeed on mobile devices, desktops, laptops and tablets, while Promoted Accounts are featured in the “Who to follow” area of the homepage.

Once you begin the ad creation process, Twitter offers a variety of targeting options, including by location, gender, interest categories, user names, device and platform. These options should be leveraged to help users reach the most relevant audience. After the campaign’s audience has been selected, creating a budget is the next step.

Twitter’s self-serve ads only require users to pay when targeted audience members engage with Promoted Tweets or Accounts. This includes interactions such as clicks, retweets, replies, favorites and follows. During the set-up process, users can select their daily maximum budget as well as maximum bid per engagement or follow. In order to make the process easier for new advertisers, Twitter even provides a recommended maximum budget for each ad type ($1.50 for Promoted Tweets and $2.50 for Promoted Accounts). Moreover, the social network provides an “Estimated Reach” graph within the self-service interface, so that users have a better understanding of how their budget and targeting options will affect their ad’s visibility.

It is also important to note that Twitter’s self-serve ad platform provides users with real-time analytics, which can be used to analyze and optimize future campaigns. For instance, the Promoted Tweets dashboard displays valuable ad metrics, such as impressions, number of clicks and click rate, while the Follower growth chart helps users keep track of their brand's growth by providing data on followers that have been gained with and without Promoted Accounts.

5 Best Practices

1. Take advantage of location targeting – Twitter’s targeting options allow users to target by location on a country, state/region and metro level. This allows users to decide if their campaign should be launched on either a very broad or a local level. Moreover, users can target numerous locations with one campaign, which is beneficial to brands that are present in a variety of areas, businesses that have storefronts in multiple locations and expanding businesses.

2. Reach relevant people/groups – Ads perform best when they are displayed to people who are interested in the advertiser and their content, which is why this targeting option can greatly influence an ad’s effectiveness. Users can target by both @username interest and interest category. The interest category option is helpful when trying to reach a specific group of people, while the @username option helps businesses make sure their ads reach specific and influential Twitter users.

3. Target based on device/platform – The device and platform targeting options allow users to focus their campaigns on their most valuable or relevant customers. For example, if you’re launching a Promoted Tweet for a new iOS app, you most certainly want to target iOS devices and probably desktop and laptop computers, however, you might want to leave Android and Blackberry users out of your campaign so that your ad dollars aren’t wasted.

4. Don’t be over-promotional – The best part of Promoted Tweets is that they are incorporated into a user’s newsfeed, which means they are not an in-your-face advertisement. That said, the best way to obtain higher engagement rates with these ads is to make sure the content appears as it would in a regular tweet. This doesn’t mean that these tweets can’t contain links or some type of promotional information, however, it’s important to stay relatable so that customers are more likely to interact with your ads.

5. Amplify existing tweets – If you have already posted an engaging tweet that contains content suitable for an advertisement (such as a white paper link, a look at a new product or info on a hot promotion), consider using it for a Promoted Tweet. Twitter allows users to promote multiple tweets, including new and existing posts. Since some content has already proved to be engaging, businesses can put it in front of a brand new audience to further increase its visibility and boost its audience interactions.

Target Twitter Ads with Keywords

Allison Howen — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:25:00 GMT

Twitter is stepping up its ad game with its latest launch of keyword targeting in timelines.

Keyword targeting allows advertisers on the micro-blogging social network to reach consumers based on the keywords in their recent tweets and the tweets that they have recently engaged with. According to Twitter’s blog, this feature is especially valuable for advertisers looking for signals of intent, because it lets them reach users at the right moment and in the right context.

“For example: let’s say a user tweets about enjoying the latest album from their favorite band, and it so happens that band is due to play a concert at a local venue,” the blog post states. “That venue could now run a geotargeted campaign using keywords for that band with a Tweet containing a link to buy the tickets. That way, the user who tweeted about the new album may soon see that Promoted Tweet in their timeline letting them know tickets are for sale in their area.”

It is important to note that this new feature won’t disrupt the user-experience on Twitter, because the social network isn’t showing ads more frequently in timelines and consumers still have the ability to dismiss Promoted Tweets that they don’t find relevant. Moreover, the Promoted Tweets that users do see should, overall, be more relevant to their topics of interest. In fact, Twitter claims that the results of its tests with a small group of advertisers show that consumers were more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets that used keyword targeting.

The feature is currently available in the full Twitter Ads UI and through the Ads API. Advertisers interested in setting up a campaign that uses target keyword simply need to enter the keywords that they want to target, choose whether they want to use phrase match or unordered keyword match, and then specify any other desired targeting options, such as location, device or gender.

The Twitter Influence in Focus

Allison Howen — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:30:00 GMT

It is no secret that Twitter influences brand-related conversations on the Web, but a new Bazaarvoice study is shedding light on how this chatter can be used to help marketers drive their business.

The Conversation Index Volume 5 takes a look at how consumers use Twitter to talk about brands as well as analyzes social's connections to both routine and major events. The report is based on an analysis of 26 million tweets, each of which mentioned at least one of 13 brands from the BrandZ Global 100 Brands list, including Adidas, Clinique, Colgate, Gillette, Hugo Boss, Nike, Pampers, Pepsi, Ralph Lauren, Samsung, Intel, Tesco and Sony. Then, this data was compared with more than 8,000 TV and radio mentions, 17 months of stock price data, more than a year-and-a-half of Google search data and 270,000 pieces of consumer-generated content from online reviews.

The study’s findings show that tweet patterns tend to correlate with stock performance. In fact, a high Twitter volume tends to accompany a high closing price, which implies that the same triggers that make stocks move upward also lead to increased social chatter. Additional insights found that product reviews tend to mention prices more often when consumer confidence is low, which makes it no surprise that price mentions also tend to fall as the Dow Industrial Average rises.

The report also found that Twitter is used differently than other channels because users tend to reveal personal interactions with brands. For example, the report compared search terms that include “Adidas” to mentions of “Adidas” on Twitter, and found that top Adidas search terms tend to be at the level of product lines and categories rather than specific items, while people on Twitter were more likely to mention what “new” products they’re wearing, and use words such as “my” and “I.” Some of the other top Twitter terms associated with Adidas referenced specific campaigns, including the hashtag #branch309adidasday. This information is important because by analyzing text within tweets, businesses can identify brand advocates as well as monitor consumer responses to news, events and campaigns.

However, one of the most interesting data points from the study found that the proportion of brand-oriented Tweets that include a link is decreasing – from 68 percent in 2010 and 55 percent in 2011 to 51 percent in the first half of 2012. This indicates that consumers are progressively talking about brands instead of just pointing to items that they bought or want to buy with a link.

While content about brands on Twitter is becoming more conversational, the Bazaarvoice report shows that less of the conversation is actually about the brand. In fact, the study found that original tweets about brands are declining, while retweeted brand mentions are on the rise. In fact, the proportion of original tweets with brand mentions has fallen from 85 percent in 2010 to 82 percent in 2011 and 78 percent to this point in 2012. In order to maintain and improve brand-oriented Twitter conversations, businesses should analyze their social data to discover which tweets are generating positive conversations, so that they can emulate these tweets and optimize future content.

“Social data offers a critical new stream of insights for brands and the industry. The social ecosystem is broad; conversations happen on brand sites and on social channels, across an ever-increasing set of devices," said Erin Nelson, CMO of Bazaarvoice. "As social content and data expands, so does the scope of our knowledge about how it both influences and mirrors activity across the digital and physical worlds. Sharing these insights with our clients and the industry is the driving force behind The Conversation Index."

Twitter Ups Relevancy of Targeted Ads

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:20:00 GMT

After a significant amount of time spent testing and tweaking, Twitter has finally rolled out a new feature to all of its advertisers that may dramatically improve the relevance of targeted ads on the microblogging social network.

See, before, Promoted Tweets or Trending Topics were displayed without taking into account how relevant or useful the ads were to a given individual user. This was largely because the site, by its nature, isn’t able to cull the kind of personal information about its users as Facebook can, since they don’t specify their interests on their profiles.

Twitter is now developing a way to glean this information from what users are actually saying on the site, as well as who they follow and some of their other activities. Unfortunately, that’s about all of the information the company has given up so far.

These changes will also allow advertisers to specify the specific @handles of users, but rather than only target those individuals, Twitter will show ads to all of their followers who share interests with them. So, for instance, if you wanted to target people who like a certain type of food, a marketer can use this feature to target people who follow a restaurant that serves a similar menu.

Digital Strategy for This Year's DNC

Administrator — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:45:00 GMT

When Business Empire Consulting (BEC), a digital agency specializing in integrated campaigns developed from big data insights, accepted the challenge of making this year's Democratic National Convention the most open and accessible convention in history, BEC cofounders Matthew Laster, Brandon Blair and Bryan Young didn’t waiver, instead they confidently relied on their own methodology — vision before execution — to tie all of the moving parts together, creating a seamless integration between the actual convention in Charlotte, N.C. and its global footprint. With the DNC fast approaching, the trio shares its thought processes behind designing the DNC’s digital strategy.

To successfully influence customers, you must optimize your message and provide a seamless experience across multiple mediums. Just like the Democratic National Convention, every business has objectives it wants to accomplish. While a presidential nomination convention is only held once every four years, there is plenty that can be learned from the DNC's goal to produce the most open and accessible convention in history.

For the DNC, increased interactivity through the inclusion of social media, interactive maps, event creation tools, calendars, forward-to-a-friend tools, a video gallery, polling, commenting, sign-up forms and automated or moderated displays of user-generated content allowed for a greater level of voter engagement. For your site, this real-time data can show you what visitors are most interested in and help develop calls to action that support those interests. But how do you decide which interactive elements are most important to your site? Take a look at social media.

B2C businesses are starting to get social media, just like they got search before it and display before that. Social has been around long enough for us to have enough examples of how to do it right and wrong. Unfortunately, most organizations in the world are repeating the same mistakes they made with display and search; they build a “social team” and silo all social media efforts to that team, which leads to an isolationist approach to our newest, and possibly greatest marketing tool.

We now live in a world where the young professional (and many older professionals) can’t imagine life without social, search, display or all things digital. We, the marketers, need to stop speaking to our audience in one place and then restarting that conversation in another, while refusing to have it in a third. That is, we need to integrate our efforts and view our website as more than just a brochure for our services. If you have had the privilege of being at the helm of a marketing campaign in the last six months, ask yourself these questions: Did your SEO keywords match the differentiators you advertised in your display and video? How accurate was your audience model, predicted conversations and responses to actual results? Most importantly, what did your audience teach you about your brand? A political convention exposes these questions on a broader scale to a much wider demographic, but if you’re not searching for these answers, you are likely missing opportunities.

One way to avoid this, is to separate the vision from the execution.

As marketers it is becoming more apparent and imperative that we change how we think. Rather than siloing ourselves into print, direct, search, social, display, mobile, location or whatever comes next, we need to begin looking at the bigger goal of driving and regaining ownership of our respective brands across all disciplines, in an integrated approach. To build a holistic vision of your brand, you must put time into building buyer profiles and audience models, developing rich content banks alongside well-defined and strong conversational gates. Then, when you have a strong core, expand it outward, executing in each discipline your audience resides in. When you finally launch your campaign and get to see that first set of results on your integrated monitoring dashboard, you’ll be amazed.

Because you properly planned your campaign you’ll have much better engagement. However, it's more than that; it's engagement around the differentiators you want to focus on, using the keywords you want to use – which, by the way, are the same ones your main assets are optimized for, so your SEM cost will drop as well. With your new insight, you’re also able to start testing your audience model as a whole against the entirety of your marketing efforts, which leads you to better placement parameters for your display and video efforts. By integrating all of your planning efforts, you’ve created a clear and concise vision, which has enabled you to have streamlined and more efficient execution. When done properly, you are then able to determine which interactive widgets go beyond being cool and actually become useful.

Best Practices

1. Sit down with all of the stakeholders and make a plan, beyond visual elements, of what you want your website to accomplish. Your key message (content) and calls to action (CTA) should back these goals. If you want engagement, tell the consumer something interesting. Make the value of your product or services easy to distinguish.

2. After you’ve created a clear and compelling call to action, develop your audience models. This may take a while, but the effort is more than worth it. Look to support your gut decisions with as much real-time or empirical data as possible. For example, one of the goals of the Democratic Convention was to increase the level of engagement with the Hispanic community, which meant going beyond making the site bilingual. Through research, we found the number of Hispanics, who use a smartphone as their primary way to access the Internet, has increased to one quarter of all Hispanics, according to Mintel. Creating in-depth audience models will help create your best- and worst-case engagement models.

3. In the case of the DNC, in about the same time it took for our initial comps and branding to be polished, we had our vision. Execution was fairly simple in theory, as we wanted to spread the conversation to everywhere. We wanted the conversations around the DNC to be the same conversation across multiple platforms, with questions asked on one platform showing visible answers on another. Suggestions made on one platform would impact other platforms in near real time. We wanted the very same conversation going on in the press pit on the main floor to be the same conversation going on in your living room, on Youtube, Facebook or that you see being tweeted about on the live tweet streams. Anyone can participate in that conversation and let their voice be heard in the most open and accessible convention in history.

Your plan may not always be good, but a plan for when to listen and when to engage can go a lot further than trying to avoid engagement altogether or just ignoring the negative. After all, we're human, and we must act like it, even online.

About the Authors

Matthew Laster, Brandon Blair and Bryan Young are the co-founders of digital agency BEC. They been named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year nominees and one of Bloomberg Businessweek’s top young entrepreneurs under 25.

Targeted Tweets Reach a Relevant Audience

Michael Garrity — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:45:00 GMT

In the realm of social media advertising, Twitter has procured a specific role, primarily for businesses to build brand awareness, but also allowing them to advertise, offer special promotions, provide customer support, answer questions, and more, all in 140-character bursts.

However, one thing that has been missing from the platform is the ability to show highly targeted tweets to users based on unique characteristics, such as location. When it comes to advertising, this ability can be incredibly advantageous, as it allows companies to get specific information to the most relevant of their followers without bombarding others, which improves the overall effectiveness of their tweets.

Late last week, Twitter announced that it was going to start offering targeted Promoted Tweets, which give brands the opportunity to reach out to specific audiences on the social network without sending a tweet to all of its followers. Advertisers will be able to compose targeted tweets with the new Tweet Box on Twitter Ads, and (as is the case with all Promoted Tweets) they’ll only have to pay when users actually engage with them. Twitter ensures that those tweets that receive the most engagement are likely to appear more often.

Brands can use this new feature in a multitude of ways. For example, when a global company releases a product on different dates in a variety of countries, they can send tailored tweets to only those followers in a specific region on the launch date.

Twitter has been testing these new tailored Promoted Tweets for a few weeks now with British Airways, Coca-Cola, the Washington Post, and Wendy’s, but the feature is now available to all advertisers on the site.

Twitter Gets One Step Closer to Google

Mike Phillips — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

It's no secret that Twitter has been mostly centered on a "push" mentality – throw enough out there and something will stick, and you'll gain followers in the mean time. Of course, the more followers you have the better chance of something sticking, or being shared. And, the cycle goes on. But things are about to change. Twitter is on its way to becoming a "pull" interaction – just like another world-famous website, Google.

If you think about Google like a social network, the similarities are clear. As a Google "publisher" your goal is to be listed and get the attention of others. When successful, your content is shared via syndication and links. As a Google "user" you're there to find information, through search. When you find something you like, you might link to that website, bookmark the page or subscribe to the site's RSS feed or e-mail newsletter. In other words, you become a "follower" of that website. But imagine if you were to "friend" every website as the result of a search ... you would quickly become overwhelmed. Now take all of that and apply it to Twitter. It's not much different.

But the real kicker is Twitter's new advertising system of sponsored trending topics and searches. Now, when you visit Twitter you will see a sponsored trending topic at the bottom of that section (at right). And when you search Twitter, you'll find sponsored tweets at the top. Sound familiar?

Right now, it's rumored that these sponsorships cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. You can bet that with that kind of money, advertisers are going to do everything they can to get their money's worth. That will result in heavy promotion of Twitter search – bringing more clicks to the advertiser and big bucks to Twitter. Twitter search is ready for prime time.

While sponsored trends and tweets might not be attainable for the average business yet it's difficult to imagine that, after some initial testing, not every business will be invited to take part. When that happens, Twitter could take another page from Google's master playbook – a bidding system of keywords and phrases for top positions on Twitter search.

Take note of this development. And in the mean times, start optimizing your Tweets. Use keywords and phrases (and trending topic terms when appropriate), hashtags, aim for retweets and make influential friends. The more you can brand your Twitter account and keywords with users, the better prepared you will be when competitors start buying your keywords for Twitter search. Also, have a look at the image below. The top result is a sponsored tweet. The third result is not, but marked as a "Top Tweet." Why? Because the advertisement has been picked up and spread as a non-paid tweet – with one click – by thousands of other users. That's something Google doesn't do.

Twitter Rolls Out Ad Program

Linc Wonham — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:51:00 GMT

Twitter has unveiled its much-anticipated monetization plan, an advertising program it is calling Promoted Tweets. The ads are rolling out in Twitter search results pages, appearing when users search for keywords that marketers have bought to link to their ads.

Promoted Tweets allows marketers the opportunity to keep their messages from getting lost in the flow of real-time conversation on Twitter. Advertisers participating in the first phase of the program include Starbucks, Best Buy, Red Bull, Bravo, Sony Pictures and Virgin America, and they are being charged on a cost-per-thousand basis to start the program.

Eventually, Twitter COO Costolo said, Promoted Tweets will be included in regular tweet streams, depending on their relevance to users. Twitter will measure each ad's “resonance” based on how users react to the messages, and will remove any post that does not achieve a certain resonance score. Advertisers will not have to pay for posts that no longer appear as Promoted Tweets.