You’ve already outlined a budget, researched your demographic, and determined the exact goals your company wants to achieve by diving into Twitter Advertising. If not, take a little detour and head to this blog post and then come back this way. In our last Twitter ads blog post, we covered a brief overview of the different types of Twitter Ad Campaigns you can choose from. Now, we’re going to dive a little deeper and focus specifically on Followers and Tweet Engagement campaigns.

Follower Campaigns

Building a Twitter following takes a tremendous amount of work, and relying on that fan base to grow organically is going to take a ton of patience, and probably coffee. Luckily, a Twitter Followers campaign can give a kick start to your quest for more followers. But first things first, let’s walk through the process of building an effective followers campaign:

1. Get things started!

Once you’re logged into your Twitter Ads dashboard, head to the top right of the page and click “Create New Campaign” and select “Followers.”

2. Give it a name and set the dates.

When naming your followers campaign, make sure the name you choose easily identifies the campaign. Eventually, you will have dashboard full of campaigns and you will want to be able to tell each campaign apart. You may also want to include targeting information and identify whether the campaign is desktop or mobile.

Sample Campaign Name: Spring 2015 Followers_Competitor Targeting_Mobile

3. Get your creative hat on.

This is the part where we get to have fun, while also conveying your messaging properly. Tell your future twitter following why they should follow you in a way that captures their attention. And remember, you must do so in 140 characters or less. Devote the majority of your time to the creative efforts of your campaign. A creative ad can make or break your cost-per-click. Take off your business hat, and think about what makes you want to follow a brand on Twitter. Then use that inspiration to craft a killer tweet that will have them hooked! Also, be sure to have an image that supports your perfectly crafted tweet.

Twitter image size recommendations vary depending on the type of Tweet you are looking to promote. Here’s a rundown of the possible image sizes you may need to create:

Website Card: 800 pixels wide × 320 pixels high

Lead Gen Card: 800 pixels wide × 200 pixels high

Standard Shared Photo: 499 pixels (max width and height varies)

Standard Share Photo (Recommended):  1920 pixels wide × 1080 pixels high

4. Target like you mean it!

Twitter ad targeting can get as granular as you would like. It can even get a bit overwhelming when you’re trying to choose from all of the targeting options. The most important thing to remember is to refer back to your demographic research.

Below is a sample Twitter Target Audience for a new ice cream company in VA. We have chosen our main target area as Virginia, females-only, and English Speaking. Then, we wanted to attract followers who were already following some of our competitors. So, we chose: Dairy Queen, Cold Stone, Skinny Dip, Sweet Frog, and Baskin-Robbins. Last, but not least, we included their buying behaviors and interests. We want to make sure our followers are in the market for our product, our delicious ice cream.

Tweet Engagement Campaigns

What’s the point of having a robust twitter following if your audience isn’t noticing the content you’re generating? That’s where a Tweet Engagement campaign comes in handy. Tweet Engagement campaigns allow you to promote your tweets to your audience and beyond. You only pay when someone engages (retweets, favorites, expands, clicks on, follows, or replies) with the tweet.

When you set-up a Tweet Engagement campaign you will follow the same steps listed above for a followers campaign. The major difference between the two types of campaigns is that with a Tweet Engagement campaign your objective is a little different. Instead of encouraging people to follow your account, your goal will be for them to engage with your content. When deciding which tweets to promote, you may want to visit your Twitter Analytics Dashboard to see which tweets on your timeline are getting the most engagement organically.

To visit your Twitter Analytics Dashboard:

You will then access a dashboard that will break down all of your tweets by impressions, engagements, and engagement rate. Go through your list of tweets and determine which tweet has the highest engagement rate (the number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions). Engagement rate will give you an excellent indication of which tweets will be worth supporting with a budget.

Below is a sample of a Tweet Engagement campaign set-up to promote Customer Magnetism’s best preforming tweets.

When targeting this Tweet Engagement campaign we wanted to reach people who are interested in our industry and who may be decision makers for businesses that could benefit from CM services.

For username targeting we included the Twitter handles of the two women we honored on #WCW in hopes that people who follow them would agree with our decision to feature them and engage with our tweet.

Under interests, we targeted people who are interested in advertising, business, marketing, entrepreneurship, and small business.

Under behavior targeting we chose to target people who are college educated, employed in the sales/marketing industry, and fit the demographic of corporate execs, corporate moms, business travelers, and big city moms.

After outlining a target audience, be sure that the audience is large enough for the tweets to be seen and small enough that you’re reaching the desired audience. For example, if the audience is less than 2,000 people you may want to consider making the targeting less niche. Niche targeting can be effective if you have an absolute understanding of who your audience is. However, it may take experimenting with a few different audiences to determine the success of your niche target audience.

Now that we’ve narrowed down our audience to reach the people we think our tweets will resonate with, it’s time to set a budget and launch the campaign. Let us know how your first follower and tweet engagement campaigns go, and in the meantime we’ll be working on Part II: Website Clicks/Conversions and Leads on Twitter. Happy Tweeting!