Twitter’s more than 300 million active users sending 500 million tweets a day offer both opportunity and challenge for brand marketing. But with an active audience of that size and a pervasive presence in today’s communication stream, the opportunities are well worth taking on the challenges.

As a result, Twitter has become a leading social media platform for businesses, enabling brands to engage through contests, live chats and advertising. Twitter ads have become an extremely useful tool for reaching this valuable audience.

Twitter offers three types of advertising options: promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends. Focusing on the needs of our client base, we’ll focus on the first two here.

We’ll start with the basics. What are they? Promoted tweets are exactly what you’d expect. They are tweets you’ve put out there and want to promote. An advertiser whose goal is to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers will pay to promote a tweet, which is then labeled as “promoted” in the feed.

Promoted accounts are accounts – in this case, brand accounts – that Twitter suggests users follow. For the targeted users, promoted accounts are put at the top of the queue, offering added reach and exposure and a way for brands to gain more followers.

There are three basic steps in setting up a Twitter ad campaign.

  1. Choose between a Promoted Tweets and a Promoted Accounts purchase.
  2. Select your targeting criteria. You’ll have primary as well as additional options.
  3. Create the tweets you want to promote.

At GMS we work with clients to set goals, develop budgets, target audiences and create retweet-worthy content in order to get the most from the Twitter investment. As always, we recommend any social media efforts like these be part of an overall integrated marketing strategy. We do that, too. Can we help you?