How to run a promoted tweet campaign

Think about your objectives and create a strategy

What do you want to achieve from creating a promoted tweet campaign? Perhaps you have a specific campaign or event you need to promote, or you simply want to increase your follower base. Review your current Twitter activity and identify what is working. From there, create a medium term strategy and some short term objectives

Tool up to target your audience

There are a number of different ways you can target your audience, and there a few tools you can use for this – Twitter’s own analytics, data about your existing supporters and Follower Wonk (one of many free/freemium tools out there)

Targeting interests - look at the free analytics Twitter has now rolled out.

Target lists - for this to work, you need to know who you want to target. This could be people who follow similar organisations, or people similar to your own followers. Once you have a few, you can use the Twitter “usernames like” tool to expand your target list based on those you are already targeting.

Keywords in people’s bios – decide on the keyword you’re looking for and use Follower Wonk to search, and export all accounts with that ketword in their bio as a file. You can then paste the top 100 accounts into Twitter by clicking the “import multiple users” button.

The advantage of this approach is that it is more niche than just targeting people like Stephen Fry's followers, for example, which means less competition for impressions and a good cost per follower.

Content is king

Identify the type of content your audience responds best to by reviewing the most shared articles on your social media channels. This could be a quote, news or real life stories. Remember the power of the image - according to Danzarrella.com tweets using pic.twitter.com are 94% more likely to be retweeted.

Test!

There is a lot you can test on Twitter, including constructing your own “organic” tests as well as a number of elements to test within Twitter’s advertising platform. If you start with a small budge, you can stop yourself from accidentally making any expensive mistakes. For promoted tweets you pay for all clicks, including clicks on your profile and on any images. So to get good value for money you need to have a very focused tweet with only one action people can engage with. 

Time to tinker

This is also known as “optimisation” – i.e. monitoring which @handles receive better impressions, their engagement rate and cost per engagement. If one isn’t getting many impressions, or engagement is below average or the cost per engagement is above average, you could swap that account out of the targeting.

Once you launch, you need to spend 10 to 20 minutes each day checking your performance, perhaps more if you are running a lot of tests. And be warned: you are likely to get most of your impressions in the evening, so be ready for a bit of evening work!