I know what you are thinking.
Why bother with Twitter advertisement when there are Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, and Google Adwords to take care of?
In terms of pure volume it might seem like Twitter is not worth it. Facebook is the king of social media platforms with 1.15 billion active users and 4.75 billion share items a day. That’s huge no matter how you spin it.
Twitter can claim 232 million active users and 500 million tweets a day. The discrepancy is pretty huge between these two platforms.
To give a baseball analogy: Facebook is like the New York Yankees (tons of fans and lots of money) while Twitter is more like the Tampa Bay Devils Rays (a group of devoted fans and not raking in much money).
But the first thing you learn doing inbound marketing is that volume is not as important as conversion rate. You can get huge volume on Facebook, with great CTR and impression percentages, without seeing effective conversion rates. With Twitter, studies have shown that ad performance is actually higher than Facebook because Twitter drives higher conversion rates.
Optify conducted a study of social media usage amongst businesses and found that Twitter has a conversion rate of 2.7%, massively outperforming Facebook (0.47%) and LinkedIn (0.8%)
So to bring it back to baseball, the lesson is this: just because the Yankees have a larger fan base and payroll does not mean they will have a better team than the Devil Rays.
More aspects are at play in developing a strong baseball team, and more aspects are at play in creating effective ad campaigns on Twitter.
Here are some tried and tested tricks to drive conversion rates with Twitter advertisements:
Give users an emotional motivation to click on your ad. Videos from you or your staff will get people paying more attention to your brand. Why? Because it’s tangible (and hopefully you can make them laugh). Co-ordinate a short video with an advertisement campaign to raise awareness and help drive conversion rates.
Advertise Percentages, Not Dollars – People are much more likely to respond favorably to 15% off than a $10 discount. You want to get that snap of interest that will bring a customer from your Twitter page to your homepage, and a percentage deal just looks more alluring than a solid dollar amount.
Don’t Overuse Hashtags – It’s become a bit of a running joke these days to use way too many hashtags. While it might be fun to play around with it on your own personal account, the secret to a great Twitter ad is simplicity and a strong visual cue (whether image or video). ‘Hashtag stuffing’ is something that frequent Twitter users will skip over in an instant.
Get The Image Size Right – Twitter makes it clear what image dimensions work best for the ad platform. Read up on them and make sure your marketing department follows through with it at all times.
Engage Your Customers with Questions – Twitter is the source of so much unconventional content these days, so why not take a stab at it yourself? Posing a question to your customers is a great way to twist the conventional advertisement procedure, as you can ask the question while sharing your visual advertisement.
The Last Word
Twitter is dominating the mobile space and consistently showing better conversion results compared to Facebook ads. Even though it will never have the volume of users that Facebook does it is clearly a resource with a lot of revenue potential for your company.