Twitter has over 310 million monthly users. Twitter is a social platform used to get the latest news and trends from around the world. Businesses can take advantage of Twitter advertisements to gain more followers for brand awareness, to drive people to their website, and to generate leads!

Growing a Following on Twitter

Twitter Ads can be run strictly to gain more followers and to build a community base online. Followers have a chance to engage with a business and vise versa. Twitter followers cannot only share a businesses’ content with their friends, but they can also make purchases online. A small business study was conducted in 2014, which found that Twitter followers could help achieve substantial sales and reach for a business.

stats Image via Twitter

 

Once an account starts to gain more followers, it is essential that the business engage with them. Some of the popular ways to engage with an audience is to ask open-ended questions that can lead to a conversation. Another way to interact with followers is to post about real time trends so that followers have something to relate to. New Belgium Brewing Company did an excellent job of creating an ad during “Shark Week” to capture more followers and become a part of the conversation.

shark week

Image via @newbelgium

Drive Traffic To Website

Twitter allows businesses to reach a specific audience tailored to a target demographic. When it comes to Twitter Ads, target people by location, gender, keywords, followers, interest, behaviors and more! Location can be broken down by country, state, and postal code. This allows even small local businesses to take advantage of advertisements to reach their target audience.

Another feature advertisers need to take advantage of is to add keywords. Twitter allows advertisers to add keywords to target searches or users that may need your product or service. For example, a local coffee shop could target ads specifically to people that are tweeting about coffee. Twitter allows advertisers to add broad match, phrase match, negative unordered match, and negative phrase match keywords. The keyword match type is very similar to the types of keywords used for a SEM Campaign.

Another Twitter ads feature that must not be overlooked is the “Add Followers” feature. This feature allows a business to add followers that may be interested in its products or services. Advertisers may also add competitors’ twitter handles to try to reach their following.

Generate Leads

At the end of the day what do all businesses want to achieve from ads? LEADS! Twitter allows businesses to add a Lead Generation Card to a promoted tweet, which allows users to share their contact information so a business can connect with them later. Getting an email address from a potential consumer can help with the success of an email marketing campaign.  In order to get an email address from a consumer, the business must first make engaging content or do an exclusive offer to make people feel special. This is a great example of doing just that:

rockcreek

Image via @RockCreek

 

Twitter, like many other social media platforms, lets businesses run advertisements to reach an audience tailored specifically to their business. It is important that businesses take advantage of this opportunity as it is an easy way to increase brand awareness while also generating more leads and driving traffic to their website.