With the news late last year that Twitter was opening up its advertising platform to all businesses, a whole new marketing channel was launched for small and medium businesses across the UK.
If you can tweet, you can advertise on Twitter
Prior to this being announced in November, companies who were not based in the US had to develop a working relationship with Twitter before they could purchase advertising space on the social network. Alienating smaller businesses, this limited advertising on Twitter to larger organisations. Now however, it’s basically a case of if you can tweet, you can advertise on Twitter.
You are in control
To get started with Twitter advertising, all you need is a Twitter account and a credit card. When putting together your advertising campaign you are in control of your ads, the audience you want to reach and your budget. With an advertising model similar to that of PPC, you will only be charged when people follow your promoted account or retweet, reply, favourite or click on your promoted tweets. With no change from before, all of your organic activity however remains free.
Boosting your brand presence
So how can Twitter advertising boost your brand presence? Well for starters, it allows your company to reach a wider audience. Unlike advertising channels like PPC, it allows you to reach potential customers without them even having to search for terms related to your brand. Twitter advertising gives you the opportunity to expose your brand to a potentially new audience.
Engage with your followers on multiple levels
Combining elements of PPC, display advertising and social media advertising, you can also use Twitter advertising as a platform to directly form a relationship with your followers. Unheard of with other advertising channels, Twitter advertising allows users to engage on multiple levels with your ads. Followers can click on your link, reply to your ad, retweet your ad to share with their followers and also favourite your ad. All of these of course will boost your brand presence as once one user has interacted with your activity, this will then be visible to their followers.
Target your audience
To ensure you are talking to the right people, Twitter has made it easier to target a relevant audience. To communicate with existing customers, you as an advertiser can securely share email addresses that you have in your CRM database. Twitter will then match this data to its database and allow you to reach out to loyal customers who are Twitter users. Not only that, it also allows you target offline audiences who may have shared their email address with you in the past.
To reach new customers, Twitter’s ad targeting allows you to drill down certain attributes to put your content in front of a relevant audience. Choose to target users based on interests, their followers, keywords they have previously used, the device they use, their gender or their location.
