Twitter\'s advancements in the ad platform combined with a still growing number of active users means that there\'s opportunity for any size advertiser for direct response or social media growth.

Digest...

The self-service platform is clean, easy to use, and fast (amazing how important that aspect is). More importantly, the targeting features have been expanded and now provide a robust set of options for advertisers. Twitter Ads is unique in the social media ad space, as there are multiple actions, or engagements, to target and track. There are clicks (on links and hashtags), retweets, replies, and follows.

When you set a bid, you are bidding on all of these engagements - thus, the cost-per-engagement (CPE) metric. Important note: the effective CPE (eCPE) metric reported on your Twitter Ads campaigns is not your actual cost-per-engagement. Twitter looks at clicks, replies, and follows that occur after someone retweets the Promoted Tweet. While you didn't pay for those engagements directly, they still occurred as a result of your ad. Just be aware and understand what that stat means!

The latest news from Twitter Ads is the inclusion of Cards. In particular is the Lead Generation Card where you can capture lead information directly in Twitter! For now this is only available to managed Twitter clients, but will soon roll out to self-serve advertisers, too.

After spending a year in limited release, Twitter has finally opened its self-service advertising program to the public.

Excerpt...

Twitter's self-service platform offers Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts as advertising formats. Both formats are labeled as “Promoted” when they appear on the social network so that users can easily identify them as paid advertisements. That said, all Promoted content is displayed next to regular content on a Twitter user’s newsfeed, which means that these ads don’t interrupt the user experience. 

Promoted Tweets, for example, appear in the newsfeed on mobile devices, desktops, laptops and tablets, while Promoted Accounts are featured in the “Who to follow” area of the homepage.

5 Best Practices

1. Take advantage of location targeting

2. Reach relevant people/groups

3. Target based on device/platform

4. Don’t be over-promotional

5. Amplify existing tweets