Page 171 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

When you buy a promoted tweet, you are choosing to have a specific tweet of yours
appear at the top of the search results page for certain Twitter terms. You can
choose any number of terms. As with Promoted Accounts, you can add a layer of
targeting to a promotion so that the tweets reach the people you really want to
reach.

Following are the types of Promoted Tweets, also shown in Figure 9-3, and what
they’re best for:

» Promoted Tweets in a search: This product is best used to target users who
do not follow your brand on Twitter. When using this product, you can reach
users through a specific search term in a similar fashion to the way Google
allows you to advertise based on searches on its website.
Bear in mind that only one advertiser can buy a search term at any given time.
As a result, if you’re looking to buy popular search terms such as those related
to pop culture events, sports, or TV shows, you may need to spend a lot of
money. Promoted Tweets are bought via an auction model. Whoever is willing
to pay the most gets the rights to advertise. Often during the course of an
evening, you can see different brands competing with one another in real
time by buying Promoted Tweets using the same search term. In this way,
they try to outbid each other for the customer’s attention.

Promoted Tweets is popular because it allows brands to attach themselves
most directly to consumer intent. For example, if you search tweets about
holidays, airlines know that you’ll probably be thinking about flights, too, and
that it is valuable for them to advertise using that phrase so that they’re visible
as you look at tweets about holidays.
» Targeting followers: Promoted tweets can be used to target followers of
your brand on Twitter as well. You may wonder why you should use advertis-
ing dollars to target followers when they’re already following you. But the
reality is that when you tweet to your followers, your tweet quickly drops
below the fold and can be missed by your followers. As mentioned earlier,
some of your Twitter users may not see the tweet at all if the Twitter algorithm
deprioritizes it for them. When you use Promoted Tweets to target followers,
the promoted tweet stays at the top of the feed. As a result, it becomes
practically impossible for the follower to miss the tweet.
Promoted tweets are valuable when you want to promote something to your
followers — the people who are typically your biggest brand advocates. This
strategy works well when you have something to share that you believe will
spread organically after it’s seeded to a small group of brand loyalists.

CHAPTER 9 Marketing on Twitter 155