How to Improve Twitter Engagement and Analytics on a Tight Budget

If you want to grow your following and receive more engagement for your tweets on Twitter, then you have the option of trying Twitter Advertising. Of course, monitoring and learning from your efforts is key to improvement, and SumAll's dashboard is a great Twitter analytics solution. Businesses with smaller ad budgets can take advantage of two types of Twitter Advertising – Sponsored Accounts and Sponsored Tweets. In this post, we will look at the different advertising options for, how you can get the most out of your advertising, and how you can measure your results.

Types of Twitter Advertising

Promoted Accounts will suggest that people follow your Twitter account in various areas throughout the Twitter platform. The following is an example of a sponsored account in the left hand side of the Twitter home screen.

Sponsored Tweets will allow you to promote up to five tweets at a time. You can manually choose which tweets to promote. Sponsored Tweets show up in a variety of areas on Twitter including the main newsfeed and Twitter search results.

Promoted Tweets are also expanded on your Twitter profile as shown in the example below.

The third ad option offered by Twitter Advertising is Promoted Trends. This one is only offered to advertisers with a large budget.

How to Setup Twitter Advertising

To get started with Twitter Advertising, log in to your Twitter account via the Twitter Ads section. You will be greeted with a welcome screen with a brief description of your advertising options. When you click Get Started, you will get to enter your ad targeting options.

As you can see in the above screenshot, you have the ability to target by location, interests based on keyword or similar Twitter users, platform, and gender. Your account will automatically be promoted based on your targeting options.

Next, you will choose what tweets to promote. You can select up to five of your latest tweets or compose a new tweet.

 

Last, but not least, you will tell Twitter how much to spend on your Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. 

Once you have entered payment, your Twitter advertising campaign will begin.

Twitter Advertising Best Practices

If you want to get the most out of your Twitter Advertising budget, here are some best practices to keep in mind.

• Make sure your profile is updated with your current information, branded picture or logo,  and includes relevant keywords in the bio. Also include a link to your website in the bio as well as in the website URL field so your link will show up when people view your profile in search results.

• Do a little research so you know what categories and other Twitter users you can use for your ad targeting options. For example, if your ideal customers follow a certain person or business, use that person or business’s Twitter profile for targeting.

• Promote different types of status updates to see which ones get the most engagement. Try offering discounts / coupons, sharing links to your content, sharing images, or sharing YouTube videos for increased engagement.

Twitter Analytics

As with all advertising campaigns, you will want to keep a close eye on your analytics to make sure your advertising is bringing in traffic and sales for your business. One of the biggest flaws in most social advertising systems is a lack of good analytics. All you can really see on most networks is how your ad budget was spent. So for Promoted Tweets, you will see impressions and engagement (clicks).

And for Promoted Accounts, you will see the number of impressions and followers gained.

Neither of these will tell you how your engagement and new followers translated into new business. This is where SumAll can help. You can sign up for a free account today and connect your Twitter account along with important data streams for your business (Google Analytics, Paypal, Shopify, and other payment / shopping cart systems) and view them altogether.

This will help you visualize whether a Twitter Advertising campaign has led to an increase in traffic and conversions for your business. Depending on the results, you will know whether to continue advertising on Twitter or focusing your ad budget elsewhere.

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.