Social Media Marketing: Twitter Marketing

Basics of advertising on Twitter

Why?

With over 250 million active users & over 500 million tweets a days, twitter can help reach to your customers at all times. About 60% of them access twitter through mobile, so you can reach your customers at all times. According to a study by Compete twitter users follow six or more brands & here are the top reasons.

Also since twitter is also a micro blogging platform used by people to share what is happening around them or latest news or trend, you can actually reach out to your audience at the right time in the right context.

Some of the existing Twitter marketing strategies can be:

Listen & Learn – listen about what your customers are saying & sharing. Are they having a problem with the product, with delivery, with price? Whatever it is twitter is a great way to direct engage with your customer, it is like a real time feedback cum audience poll platform

Grow & Succeed – you have limited period offer, last minute rush or seasons clearance sale, and twitter can be an active tool to share this information with your existing user base. Also in countries where there are strict DO NOT DISTURB guidelines prohibiting marketers from making pesky marketing calls, twitter can come as a handy marketing tool to share the word of mouth.

Learn from other – see what the business is doing, what new promotion scheme they are running. This can help you understand the completion & market dynamics.

Develop an audience base

It is very important to have a regular customer base following you, not only this will help in promoting the word of mouth better, but also give authenticity to you voice. Here are some Basics tips on building your twitter base

Be a good listener – keep a pulse on the mention of your company name, product service. See if customers are appreciating or complain about them, if they are satisfied or not. This will not only help in creating your content strategy of your company but also in the product & marketing strategy.

Find your voice; be creative – As much as it matters of what you are saying, so does it matters of how you are saying it. Be creative & original is your content. Also since it’s a micro blogging/social media site don’t be too formal with your audience, use humor/satire bee creative & keep it conversation styled rather than blasting your voice on top of your lungs.

Be strategic- Develop a content strategy, where you give a reason to your audience o come to listen to you at least once a day, if not multiple time in a day. Here is an example, let’s say you are a local restaurant so give tips on cooking delicious food every Wednesday, information of food nutrient every Thursday, some information on cuisine etiquettes on Friday, Show insider information about your store and high quality service levels on Saturday, how fun it is wok at your restaurant on Sunday, special promotion offer on Monday, when your normal customer volume is less, Q&A from your chef on Tuesday. Keep them engaged so your audience knows they will find something new & exciting every day.

Targeting options

Twitter allows you to target basis two main types of targeting options

• ·         Demographic
• ·         Keyword
• ·         Interest & Username
• ·         Website Tag for remarketing
• ·         Tailored Audience
• ·         TV targeting
• ·         Device, Carrier & New mobile user

Demographic – these include geography, gender and language targeting

Geographic targeting – if you are targeting for a particular location, you can target it by country, state, city or a particular zip-code.

Gender & language – You can also limit your audience by their gender or language.

Keyword targeting – it when targeting based on the matching a particular keyword in their searches, mention in their tweets or mentioned in the tweets they were engaged in. This targeting option is considered to be one of the best since you would be reaching the customer when they will have your product on the top of their mind & thus will have the maximum recall. There are four main types of match for any keyword targeting. Broad match, phrase match, negative unordered match & negative phrase match.

• Broad match – these match type matches keywords in tweets in any order including words in between. Includes related terms, stem, slang, misspelling & synonyms. Specified by leaving out any punctuation.
• Phrase Match – Matches on tweets containg words in the same specific order. Specified by quote marks around the key word. Example “Food”.
• Negative unordered match – tweets contain negative word in any order, including other words in between. Specified by negative sign at beginning of the key word.
• Negative phrase match – tweets contiang negative key words in the exact same order, with no words in between. Example –“restaurant”

Interest & Username - You can target your audience by interest & username. Let’s say you are a car shop in Sydney & sell car & accessories. So you can target your audience basis the type of cars you cater to hatch back, sedan, convertible, luxury etc. Targeting by username can be done to target followers of a specific username. Let’s say you are again an automobile supplier in Sao-Paulo and want to target all the enthusiast who are following the formula one race there, you can do so by targeting the username, or that of any particular company.

Re-marketing Website visitors - You can re-market or re-target your website visitors on twitter. Here it how it works – when you create a campaign you select for a website “tag”. This tag is place on you website between the body tags & . When someone visits your website a cookie is dropped on their browser to tag them as your visitor. Next while launching the campaign you can target to your visitors on their twitter timeline.

Twitter re-marketing I very effective if you see high amount of traffic or your product offering or promotions vary a lot, such as in case of e-commerce sites.

Tailored Audience - Tailored audience is your existing audience that can be divided into three main categories – list, web & app.

• Tailored audience through list – these are your customers base that you target by uploading your base of email ids, mobile no, twitter ids (or twitter user name) or mobile advertising Ids. 
• Tailored audience through web – these are web audience that have visited you website & you retarget through twitter.
• Tailored audience from mobile app- these are people that are using your mobile app & are collected with conversion tracking for mobile apps.

TV targeting - You can target your audience basis on the specific shows you can do this by three mediums, TV show targeting, TV network targeting, TV genre targeting.

Device, Carrier, New mobile user targeting - You can also target your user basis the device they are using, the carrier they are using, whether they are on Wi-Fi or if they are new to twitter or have recently switched their mobile handset.

Bidding & Auction  

You can set your daily & overall campaign bid, where you will be charged only a certain amount you specified in your daily budget & once your campaign budget is over, your campaign will stop. 

The maximum bid – this is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for one engagement

There are two modes of bidding – standard & accelerated. Standard delivery is when your ad is served throughout the day at the same pace. Accelerated delivery is when your maximum impression is served early in the day to gain maximum clicks.