twitter advertising

I’m a huge fan of Twitter and use Twitter every single day (my handle is @ianlopuch). Twitter is a great way to stay connected with my readers, Find Inspiration, and also learn new stuff. In addition to all of that, Twitter is an open platform that can be crawled by search engines. From an SEO standpoint, it’s a channel that cannot and should not be ignored.

As such, I created a Twitter Advertising Challenge for myself back in January. There were several main goals of the challenge: follow no more than 200 people, redesign my Twitter background, and advertise to gain more followers. Back in February, I called my Twitter Challenge a Success since I had accomplished goals 1 and 2 (and also did a Facebook redesign too). At that time, I had no luck getting a Twitter Advertising account so I couldn’t do much towards goal 3. However, in May I got lucky and received my very own Twitter Advertising account (with $100 free credit) thanks to the Twitter/American Express partnership for small businesses.

Since one of my main 2012 Goals is saving money, I did not want to spend too much on Twitter. Last year, I spent a lot of money Getting Thousands of Facebook Fans for my portfolio of websites/Facebook Fan Pages so this year I’m trying to save and drive as much margin as possible. That said, the American Express coupon coupled with $60 of my own money did yield some interesting insights about Twitter and allowed me to cross this goal off of my list! Here are my findings (also please see screenshot below with stats from my Twitter Ads account):

Promoted Accounts offer a cheap way to drive incremental followers. I spent $110 on Promoted Accounts and got 115 incremental followers (only $0.96/follower). I actually started out bidding really high (I think ~$2.00/follower per Twitter’s suggested bid) but then bid down over time. I could have bid down even more and gotten followers even cheaper. The point here: You will be able to drive followers for $1.00 or probably even less as you lower your bids over time. As compared with my Facebook experience, this avenue seems cheaper than driving a Facebook Fan (although I feel the value of a FB Fan is higher). I have driven Fans as low as the $0.30 range on Facebook, but when I first started out, I remember the unit cost being higher than Twitter.
I especially like the Promoted Account option for newer accounts trying to build up a loyal following and credibility.
Your budget will go really quickly. I set daily budgets with my Twitter Ads test. The budget did not get deployed evenly over the course of the day. Rather, I blasted through my budget right away. Now, the UI I’m dealing with here is the American Express small business one, so I’m sure larger enterprise advertisers may have more options. However, in any event, the point here is to be careful. If you don’t want to spend your budget between midnight and 1:00 am, it will be important to either manually day part, leverage an online marketing platform to do this for you, or seek an enterprise account (not sure if they offer this but assuming they offer more control than my basic account).
Promoted Tweets offer the ability to do SO much more than simply drive clicks. More clicks/traffic is always great, but what I especially enjoyed about my Promoted Tweets test is the fact that I instantly started getting ore followers, retweets, favorites, and overall brand activity than ever before. These days, especially with the Panda and Penguin updates, Google is looking at one’s brand. With Promoted Tweets, you have the perfect tool to build your brand within online marketing. Personally, if I am to spend more money on Twitter, I will probably focus on Promoted Tweets due to the brand ramifications.
Overall, my basic account did not offer a huge amount of control. With Promoted Tweets, for example, I got to select 5 Tweets to promote and set a budget. Other than that, Twitter would just run with it. As a power user, I’m used to having a ton of control. More dials means more ability to optimize. My basic account experience offered little ability to optimize. That said, it was my true pleasure to get my feet wet with Twitter Ads and I’m excited in the future to build my expertise and get my hands on an enterprise account.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter and recommend that you too give Twitter Ads a try!

Image in this post © Twitter / PPCIan.com Acccount

I got started with Twitter early on and leveraged smart strategies from day one. These strategies have propelled my following to over 17,000 on Twitter and have driven a significant amount of traffic to PPC Ian. That said, I’m always looking to improve and have set a challenge for myself. Twitter is hot right now so it’s the perfect time to revamp my Twitter account. Today, I’m going to outline the challenge I’m setting for myself and one month from now I’ll report back on the results!

Initiative One: Follow No More Than 200 People

Right now, I have 17,060 followers but am following 16,826. My Twitter stream is basically unusable. I want to be able to log in to my Twitter account and make sense of things, only seeing tweets that are relevant and interesting to me. If I am following no more than 200 people, I’ll be able to use Twitter once again.

Why am I following so many people right now? It was actually part of my initial strategy. I went out there and followed a ton of people knowing that a certain portion would reciprocate and follow me back. I would then unfollow those who did not follow me back. I did this many times and was able to drive a significant number of followers with this strategy. It’s a great strategy I still recommend for building out your initial base of followers. More followers equals more social proof and brand equity.

How am I going to remove 16,500+ followers? I’m going to go through all my @ messages and find out who I’ve interacted with. Then, I’m going to put them on my Tweet Adder white list. (Tweet Adder is a really helpful Twitter utility that I recommend purchasing if you’re serious about advertising on Twitter.) After my white list is loaded with my favorite people, I’m going to remove 1,000 people each day (who are not on my white list) until I’m done. Sure, I’m going to remove some good people by accident, but I can always add them back later.

Will I lose followers with this strategy? Absolutely. That said, I don’t think I’m going to lose more than 5,000 followers. I’m ok with this, and believe that I’ll retain most followers.

Initiative Two: Redesign My Twitter Background

My Twitter background has not been updated in years. It still looks ok, but could be a lot better. I’ve decided to engage the same designer who designed and built IJL.net for me. I’m sure the results will be great. Also, I’m sure my new background will help drive even more followers in the future.

Initiative Three: Advertise and Gain More Followers

After I reduce the list of people I’m following, I’m sure to lose a few followers. I’m going to partially make up for this by running a paid advertising campaign on Twitter. I’ve had phenomenal results running Paid Like Campaigns on Facebook. I have not tried this yet on Twitter, but am quite excited. At the very least, I’ll get that cool “Verified Account” badge by signing up as an advertiser. Also, I hope to gain some serious experience that I can then leverage at my job. In my opinion, it’s critical for all PPC professionals to master Facebook and Twitter in addition to AdWords and adCenter.

Stay tuned, I’m hoping to have some interesting findings in my journey to optimize my Twitter account. Want to connect on Twitter? Please don’t hesitate to reach out, my Twitter handle is ianlopuch.