Advertising on Twitter

The information “more-super“ highway

One ant is dumb, a colony of ants is smart, and unlike the Borg from Star Trek they are not commanded or directed by an “all knowing” queen, or central brain.  In fact the intelligence is created by the conglomerate of individuals working together, and sharing individual information to create the hive mind.  I have watched the social media sphere to see if this is the new level of intelligence.  When intelligent beings create a hive mind you create something hyper-awesome.  Of course to understand it you need a way to sit above all the noise and parse the data into useable information. 

Twitter is my best hope for knowing what everyone else knows in series.  With 200 million active users producing 340 million “Tweets”¹ it still has only 2.88% of the world population 6,973,738,433.  Obviously Twitter is a long way from being the hive mind of the world.  Of course if you are focusing on the United States they have a total user base of over 140 million users (active and inactive) ².  The US Twitter user base has an average age of 37.3 years old and is mostly women (60%) ³.  As business is my focus in learning this particular information.  How can I use this social hive, and its demographic to further my good/or evil business purposes?

How would I advertise using Twitter?

There are three methods to advertising on Twitter.  First promoted accounts, this would be helpful to create a large following for your company or business so that you can give them “information” about what your company is doing.  Promoted accounts puts your name at the top of the “who to follow” section and recommends people to follow you.  Keeping them engaged is then up to you.  Using the demographics within Twitter campaigns can be geo-targeted to people within a certain area.¹

The second advertising method is promoted tweets.  There are multiple options to utilize this feature.  When someone is searching Twitter your promoted tweet could be at the top of the search list.  This seems similar to Google’s approach.  You can also target specific individuals such as: your followers, people like your followers, people using a specific mobile devise platform, or geographical location.  Priced at a cost per engagement (CPE) you only pay when someone clicks, retweets or replies.¹

The third way to advertise is promoted trends.  This is a way to make the new popular trend that everyone is talking about link to your brand.  It helps you build massive brand awareness by association to the trend.  This is still in beta, and not available to all users.

How’s your advertising working?

TwitterAnalytics is available to all advertisers and allows you to check in real time the impressions, retweets, clicks and replies through the inbox dashboard.  You can check the timeline to see the history of your tweets and see the success of getting eyeballs to your ad.  Then you can create your own demographic information to see who your particular followers are and who they are following and what they are interested in, their geography, gender, and engagement.  You can find the users who are most influential in adding value to your ad campaign and target them even more specifically.¹

Advertising with Twitter gives you a very high degree of specificity when targeting your audience, there is little guesswork in knowing who specifically likes your product.  Twitter does well at targeting those who already follow you and if you can influence their network of friends to follow you also, you have succeeded.  It is now up to you to be clever enough to keep your customers/audience happy and to entice them to give you their money.

sources:

1. https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/what-is-twitter/
2. http://semiocast.com/publications/2012_07_30_Twitter_reaches_half_a_billion_accounts_140m_in_the_US
3. http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/social-network-age-distribution-580px.jpg