A Final Word About Social Media Sites
You don’t have to limit your use of these sites to social advertising campaigns. As I explained in the previous chapter, social media sites provide a unique and valuable research tool that enables you to tap into your target customer’s mindset. By studying the people who respond to your social ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you can gain valuable insight into the demographics, wants and needs, and buying behaviors of your target customers. You can use this research to your benefit in planning and executing lead-generation campaigns using other tactics, such as direct mail, trade shows, etc.
› › › What You Should Know ‹ ‹ ‹
To review, here is what you should know about social advertising on Twitter:
Twitter has a program called Twitter for Business that you can use for social advertising. Currently, you must apply to Twitter in order to be accepted into this program. Twitter requires that you have a minimum of 500 followers of your company account to be accepted.
Twitter offers several Promoted Products, including Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. Promoted Accounts lets you promote your company’s account. Promoted Tweets lets you send out special offers in the form of tweets to your Twitter subscribers, and to non-subscribers who have similar interests.
In general, your Promoted Tweet must have a value proposition, offer, and call-to-action, and must be no more than 140 characters. You must also include a destination URL to take people who click on the tweet to a landing page. Twitter uses bit.ly to shorten your destination URL.
Twitter controls the targeting process and determines which Twitter users will see your Promoted Accounts and Tweets, based on the interests of your current Twitter subscribers. Twitter’s Promoted Products will work best for you if the subscribers to your company account are a good representation of the kinds of target customers you are trying to reach.
For Promoted Accounts, you pay a cost-per-follow (CPF) rate every time a Twitter user subscribes to your account. For Promoted Tweets, you pay a cost-per-engagement (CPE) rate every time a Twitter user clicks on your tweet, retweets it, replies to it, or marks it as a favorite.
As with Web-based social media sites, Twitter will ask you to bid an amount that you are willing to pay for each Promoted Account or Tweet. You will be asked to set a budget for the amount you are willing to pay (e.g., $7,000 for one week). Your Promoted Account or Tweet will run until it receives enough clicks at your bid rate (e.g., 7,000 clicks at $1 per click) to meet that budget.
You should test your social media campaign on Twitter for a week. Twitter gives you a set of robust analytics tools to monitor the response to your Promoted Accounts and Tweets.