This is how most of us start advertising: Write a tweet or a status, set a budget, choose some targeting options and then boost the post to earn more clicks.

After that, we just hope for best.

This method might work for Facebook because of its advanced and complex targeting option, but does it work for Twitter? No chance at all!

Twitter is all about conversation and interactions, so the one thing that matters most on Twitter is: Twitter Engagement

Twitter engagement is one of the most important metrics while measuring your content performance. It can help you find the most valuable posts and understand your audience.

In this post, I’m happy to share the mistakes most companies commit while advertising on Twitter and how to eradicate them so as to make Twitter ads profitable for you

Twitter Engagement is when someone interacts with the content you post on Twitter. There are several ways a customer can engage with your tweet, including:

• Replying to your tweet
• Retweeting your tweet
• Favoriting your tweet
• Mentioning you in another tweet
• Clicking your tweet

As soon as your followers do any of these 5 things, you’ll know your tweet is taking off.

Why Tweet Engagement Matters in Advertising

Twitter engagement shows how customers are interacting with your content. It’ll help you determine which content , as it allows you to understand your audience and their needs.

Here’s how:

If a tweet gets more organic engagement, then boosting it with proper targeting options and budget is likely to give it more exposure -and more clicks to your website.

Here’s a real-life example: Sean Ellis, the founder of Growth Hackers & Qualaroo, shared this post on his Twitter account:

The tweet ended up getting 1k+ clicks within just 24 hours for a small $25 and Sean Ellis ended up sharing the key lessons he learned from the campaign:

Lesson 1: So my first lesson was to have a low daily budget. $25 seems to be a good fit because it gives the sponsored Tweet enough opportunity to be seeded for the day, but the spend is relatively low.

Lesson 2: They suggested that I include an image with my sponsored Tweet. I did this and saw the engagement rate go up quite a bit on my sponsored Tweets.

Lesson 3: My final lesson was to include the link in the middle of the tweet rather than at the end.”
Sean Ellis, Founder @Growth Hackers

This isn’t a one-off.

Larry Kim, the founder of Wordstream, has built his whole business by promoting his best stuff.

How to Make Your Twitter Ads Profitable

Twitter ads give you an opportunity to go viral. But unfortunately, at times they can be a bit costly if you’re not familiar with the platform.

However, with the proper process in hand, you can shape them according to your budget and acquire quality leads.

Here’s the 3 step formula I follow to make Twitter ads profitable:

Step #1 – Post Lots of Stuff Organically

Twitter has a 140 characters limit for the tweets (although, according to some rumors it’s going to change soon). However, they don’t stop you from tweeting multiple time in a day.

According to buffer, ideally, you should be posting 5 times per day or more for best results.

Here’re some of the tools that can help you in scheduling your tweets:

Buffer

Buffer is one of the best social media scheduling apps. It lets you schedule your tweets in advance, and you can also analyze the performance of your tweets in their built-in analytics.

MissingLettr

Missinglettr is a newcomer in social media space. What I love about this software is that it automatically creates a drip marketing campaign for each of your blog post.

Which saves your time and helps you get more exposure.

Quuu

You’re not posting only your content, are you? Because you don’t want to write 5 pieces of content in a day, nor do you want to look slazy.

That means you need to find quality content in your niche. Well, Quuu is the solution to that.

This social media scheduling software automatically grabs content suggestion for your social media accounts and pushes it to your buffer account.

Which saves your time, and also helps you build a targeted following.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a whole suite for your editorial needs. It’s an editorial calendar which helps you plan and schedule all of your content straight from your WordPress dashboard.

It’s a savior for those who write tons of posts and need a tool to save their time and get more productive.

Step #2 – Find Your Best Stuff and Spend $$ Promoting It

The aforementioned tools will help you write and analyze meaningful tweets for your account. In this step we’ll see how to find high engagement posts.

Login to Twitter Analytics.

Once you’re in there, click the tweets tab and then click Export to export all your tweets.

Twitter will take few seconds to process it, depending on your account, then it will send a request to download a CSV file.

Open the file and sort the “Engagement Rate” tab by descending order.

Now, the top tweets you get are the most engaging ones. And these are the ones where you should spend your dollars.

To promote your top tweets, head over to ads.twitter.com, login to your advertising account or create a new one.

Next up, click create new campaign, followed by website clicks or conversions.

Name your campaign, select targeting option, and set the budget to $25/day, so you don’t end up paying for each click.

You must include an image in your promoted tweet to increase its visibility and click-through rate (CTR). The recommended size for pictures in a Twitter ad is 440 pixels by 220 pixels.

While setting up your campaign, pay close attention to “Potential Audience” on the right side of your Twitter dashboard.

When you’re setting up the campaign, make sure you target the relevant audience. Targeting to your Twitter lists and your email list is the best way to promote your content.

Here’s an excellent example of this:

When Larry KIM Used $50 to Gain Massive PR

Larry wrote this blog post for WordStream.

He shared the post throughout his social media account,  then promoted the post to the list of influencers using Twitter Ads.

Within 48 hours, the post picked 500+ press mentions.

And 100K visitors. All of this with just $50 budget and 10 minutes of campaign setup.

Step #3 – Use Retargeting to Get Back Lost Visitors

Did you know that about 95% of your site visitors leave your site without converting or buying?

And they never return. That’s where Twitter retargeting ads come in.

Retargeting is a form of advertising to the visitors who otherwise already left your site. That means with retargeting you can engage with that 95% who are leaving without doing anything meaningful to your business.

With Twitter, you can now use Promoted Tweets and Twitter Cards to retarget to your lost visitors. Here’s how to get started:

#1 Install Twitter Website Tag

Login to ads.twitter.com. Then, click tools, followed by conversion tracking.

Next up, agree to terms and conditions and then click generate website tag for conversions.

On the next page, you’ll get the code. Copy the code and send it to your developer.

If your website runs on WordPress, you can do it yourself using Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is a centralized place for you to put all your tags, be it Google Analytics or Facebook Tag or any snippet.

Head over to Google Tag Manager and create a new account.

Click add a new tag, choose custom HTML, paste the Twitter tag inside the field and select “All Pages” under firing rule.

Click save and name the tag.

Now hit publish and copy the website ID available in the top corner.

Login to your WordPress dashboard, go to plugin section and click add new.

Type in “Google Tag Manager” in the search box and click search.

Install the plugin, and paste your website ID to setup proper tracking.

#2 Segment your audience to send the right content

For beginners, Twitter Tag is a great way to retarget to the visitors who leave your site without converting. But this is just a start.

In Twitter, you can create multiple conversion events based on their behavior.

This lets you create custom experiences for your audience based on the pages they visit and the products they purchase. You can nurture your audience, engage with them, and finally, promote your products all within Twitter.

For beginners, I recommend creating at least 3 tags:

1. One for the whole site.
2. One for each of your product or services.
3. One for your blog, for those who are consuming your content.

#3 It’s time to retarget

Now, everything is set. You’ve all the necessary data to retarget. You know about your audience; you know what content they like and you know they product or services they’re interested in.

So it’s high time to retarget these visitors.

For retargeting campaigns, you can either use Promoted Tweets, Twitter Cards, or Videos. All of them give you a great way to retarget to your audience.

Let’s say you want to use Promoted Tweets. For that, click creatives tab and then Tweets. Write your tweet, upload the relevant image and add it to the appropriate ad campaign.

If you want to use videos or Twitter Cards, follow the same steps.

Finally, you can add variations to your ads for split testing, to increase CTR and downloads.

Final Thoughts

Twitter advertising is hugely undervalued because of the pricing. But, it can be profitable for your business, provided you play with it and dive deep within its dashboard.

For those who want to use Twitter ads to grow their business, I have one more resource -precious (but free) for you, a super handy worksheet: 51 Headline Formulas to Turbocharge Your Twitter Ads.

And now… are you ready to rock Twitter? Let me know how you did!

Aman Thakur shows Twitter advertisers simple and effective ways to generate more clicks and revenue from Twitter ads.

He is the proud author of  51 Headline Formulas to Supercharge Your Twitter Ads

A writer by day and a reader by night, he can be found online tweeting about marketing, or watching Cricket matches”.