Businesses and other organizations have long used Twitter as a social marketing tool, but the social media’s ad platform brought many of them even more exposure. For a price, of course. If you’re not yet advertising on Twitter, this is a good time to ask yourself “Should I”?
What Twitter Advertising Can Offer You
Twitter offers a self-advertising program that lets you promote your profile, your tweets, or both. You can manually select the tweets you want to promote, or let Twitter chose five of the most engaging tweets you posted recently.
Multiple targeting options are available by location, gender, device, or interest/keywords. Device targeting coupled with Twitter’s popularity among smartphone users makes the network a great option for mobile ads.
However, the location targeting is rather limited, offering radius-level targeting only in the U.S and Japan. Otherwise, you’re bound to entire metro areas or countries, which might not be as bad as you think.
The Cost of Twitter Advertising
Twitter ads are based on a cost per engagement (CPE) model. With this model, you pay for any billable action (such as following your profile) that a user takes with your promoted tweets. The cost of Twitter ads starts theoretically at $0.01 per engagement. But since advertisers have to bid for the ads, you will likely end up spending at least $1 per engagement.
The good thing about Twitter advertising is that you can set a lifetime or a daily budget for each campaign, making the ads cost-effective. Anyway, you need at least $50 to start a decent advertising campaign on Twitter. The auction model means that breaking into a new market or niche can be relatively cheap.
For Who Is Twitter Advertising?
It’s not an easy question to answer. You have to remember that Twitter’s advertising platform and audience share is different to Facebook or LinkedIn ads. While marketers are embracing it, they do it with caution.
What’s clear so far though is that most users don’t like to talk business on Twitter. If you want to advertise a blog, an event, an exhibition, a fund-raiser, or anything related to entertainment, sports, or fashion, Twitter ads are great. But for more mundane marketing, you will want to approach Twitter advertising with care, always keeping in mind that you have alternatives like Facebook ads and Google Ads.