My golden rule for Twitter campaigns

For someone who has never done a Twitter campaign before, the ad platform can appear daunting. The good news is that Twitter has made creating a new campaign very simple and straightforward. Even if you aren’t sure what type of campaign you’re after, the ‘help me decide’ option makes it easy to work out exactly what you want.

Here are the five different types of campaign options:

• Tweet engagements - Do you have a particular tweet that you want to to get retweeted or replied to? This will likely be what the majority of campaigns will use.
• Website clicks or conversions - Got an article or page that you want to drive traffic to? This requires a small snippet of tracking code to be copy-pasted on the website so the clicks or conversions can be measured. Not too tricky to set up, but I suggest reading up about it before starting this kind of campaign.
• App installs or app engagements - This is a campaign to increase installation numbers of an app on a mobile device using a Twitter ‘card’. This also requires conversion tracking and may be a little tricky for someone without previous experience in this kind of campaign. If this campaign is for you, I’d recommend reading everything you can beforehand. However, Twitter does streamline the process.
• Followers - Helps grow your follower numbers. Exactly what you’d expect. This campaign will put a tweet in your targeted audience’s timeline with a ‘Follow’ button.
• Leads on Twitter - This one is my personal favourite, as I’ve had a lot of success with it. It creates a Twitter ‘card’ that helps encourage people to submit their email address to an exportable database with one click.

A Twitter ‘card’, if you’re wondering, is an additional piece of content that gets attached to a tweet. Click here to read more about the different types. It’s likely that you’ve seen plenty of them on Twitter before, so you may recognise some.

Now you’ve chosen your campaign, you have a fair idea of what your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) should be. KPIs are important, especially when you consider your original objective. This leads us to my Golden Rule for Twitter Campaigns:

It is a common mistake to cram your campaign tweets with junk that doesn’t add anything to your KPI.

For example (KPI - increase retweets):

Example Tweet: “If you like this post then retweet it! #RetweetingIsFun” 

As you can see, the above tweet has a hashtag - thousands of people click the hashtag and nobody retweets. You pay for all those hashtag clicks, when what you really wanted was your campaign funds to go towards getting retweets.

The above is obviously just an example, but it’s worth noting that anything clickable counts as an engagement alongside retweets or replies. This can include clicks on hashtags, Twitter handles, links, pictures, videos, etc. However, not all of these engagements have the same value. On average, the cost-per-engagement on a retweet will be higher than a click.

There is another common mistake: Putting a Twitter @ mention into a promoted tweet. This is often the case when there is some kind of celebrity endorsement or for when the tweet is trying to associate itself with a Twitter account with more followers.

With a clickable Twitter handle in a promoted tweet, you’ll be paying to drive traffic to that account and not to engagements with your content. If the involvement of a large Twitter account is important, it is always better to email them asking them to retweet a particular tweet. Or, add the Twitter handles to non-promoted tweets of the same content, that means they still get the exposure and can still retweet something that mentions them.

Like all rules, there is something of an exception...

Say, you have a campaign where you want lots of exposure to look at a photo, infographic or video. You know that a click on this content is considered an engagement so will be part of the cost-per-engagement.

The important action is to lay out the priorities of the KPIs. Twitter Analytics will tell you the number of retweets and will also tell you the number of ‘Embedded media clicks’, which can be a click on an image, a click to play a GIF file or a click to play an embedded YouTube video. This data can be just as useful as the number of retweets because it is showing you how Twitter users are engaging with your content.

My Golden Rule for Twitter Campaigns is mostly about keeping your tweets optimised for a specific purpose and your campaigns as cost effective as possible. Keep this in mind when designing your campaign and you should find much more pleasing results.