How to use Twitter advertising in your digital marketing plan

Twitter has become a central platform in the social media landscape. Users of the platform send more than 500 million tweets every day and make more than 2 billion searches. Are you showing up in their timelines?

Read below to learn more about who’s using the platform and why, what the advertising options are and how you can leverage these options to meet your marketing goals.

Who’s using Twitter?

According to research by the Pew Research Center, 24% of U.S. adults say they use the platform. When broken down further by demographic data, a more detailed picture emerges. Here are some fast facts about Twitter users by demographic:

  • 45% of 18-24-year-olds say they use the platform while only 14% of adults 50 years or older tweet;
  • 32% of people that make $75,000 or more per year are Twitter users;
  • 32% of people with greater than a college degree are on Twitter; and
  • 24% of women and 23% of men tweet.

With this user picture in mind, how are people engaging with the Twitter platform? 46% of users go on Twitter at least once a day with 26% reporting multiple logins per day. 80% of Twitter usage is on a mobile device and 74% of users reported using the platform for news updates in 2017.

In short, Twitter users tend to use the platform to get quick updates from the accounts they follow while they are out and about. These updates can be news, funny videos or maybe a promotional tweet from a brand they like.

Having this data in mind is important for crafting a Twitter advertising plan that makes sense for your business. If you are looking to reach seniors with a webpage that looks best on a desktop, Twitter is probably not the best platform for your advertisement.

What are the advertising options?

Advertising on Twitter comes in a few different options. The key functions of Twitter ads are one of the following:

  • Encourage targeted users to visit your website or download/use your mobile application;
  • Get more people to see your tweet or video;
  • Have more people engage with your tweets (favoriting or retweeting);
  • Show your ads before other users’ video content (pre-roll ads that users can skip after 5 seconds); and/or
  • Grow your follower base

Before you build a Twitter advertising campaign, you need to decide which ad options best align with your marketing goals. If you’re trying to generate leads, you’ll need to send your target audience to your website. If you want to increase awareness among a particular demographic, awareness or pre-roll ads may be more appropriate. Or, maybe you want to grow a bigger community of fans to engage with – consider an engagement or followers-based ad.

Once you’ve decided on an ad objective, your next step is narrowing your target audience. Twitter provides targeting options based on interests, location, age, followers of other accounts and more. You can also target users that have already visited your website with remarketing messages.

How can Twitter advertising help you market your business?

Twitter advertising may not work for every business, but it can be useful for brands that want to reach the demographic groups that use the platform the most.

However, the most promising aspect of Twitter advertising is the video functionality. Video has become increasingly popular on the platform. In fact, Twitter reports that tweets with video are 6x more likely to be retweeted than tweets with a photo and 3x more than tweets with GIFs.

If you are creating video content already, consider using Twitter’s advertising platform to get those videos onto the mobile devices of people you’d like to reach. If video isn’t in your repertoire yet, Twitter can still be useful, but you shouldn’t expect anything to go viral.

For more tips on marketing, check out our other blogs here.

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