SOCIAL MEDIA
While the actual cost of an ad
will vary according to a wide
range of factors – many of
which you can control, so test
to bring down those costs! –
there are still averages we can
discuss. In the past, Twitter ads
can run around $2 per piece of
engagement for most targeted
audiences, or more with a
promoted account.
One thing to watch for is that
Twitter just released a new ad
format, called conversational
ads. The y’re promoted tweets
where the ad is a hashtag users
can click to participate in the
conversation. It remains to be
seen just how they’ll settle in,
both in terms of effectiveness
and in cost.
This isn’t all bad, of course.
Twitter ads may be 6x more
expensive than Facebook ads,
but they have a click-through
rate on average even higher.
Even mediocre ads tend to
be about 8x more effective in
earning clicks, while optimized
ads can be as high as 24x higher
than Facebook, or more.
Twitter on Mobile
Most of you know that Twitter
was designed as a mobile-first
platform, back in the days of
SMS character limits, charges
per-text, and dumb phones.
Moving to a desktop platform
has always been relatively
secondary, as their app is
arguably their primary focus.
Visual Contenting
This has numerous benefits for
brands, particularly in attracting
and engaging local users who
might be out on the prowl for a
business fitting your description
right now. People have a desire,
an immediate goal, and they
search to fill it. They find you,
because you’re there, you’re
mobile, and you’re local.
Easily 63% of Twitter’s users
access Twitter via mobile, well
over half of those 320 million
monthly active users. Most of
them obviously aren’t local to
you, of course, but that’s still
incredibly focus on mobile users.
Even Facebook falls behind,
though admittedly not by much.
Mobile has another benefit that
ties into the previous section
as well. It’s a lot harder to block
ads on a mobile device than it
is on a desktop, where you just
have to install a simple browser
extension. That means mobile
users are much more likely to
experience – and engage with –
ads on Twitter.
Mobile users disproportionately
sign on during their daily
commutes, to and from work.
It’s a little unfortunate that no
small percentage of those users
are behind the wheel at the time,
many more are undoubtedly in
taxis, on subways, on the bus,
or in a carpool. If you can target
your audience while they’re
heading to work, your clickthrough rate is going to be quite
a bit higher, given that you have
a captive audience.
Quick Tips for Twitter
Content
You can stare at metrics and
analytics all day, but they aren’t
nourishing to the marketer soul.
The real meat and potatoes of
Twitter is the content, be it for
ads or for organic posts.
• Tweets that ask for a retweet
by saying “please RT” or
otherwise using the acronym
RT get around 12x more
retweets than tweets that
don’t ask at all.
• Tweets that ask for a retweet
by saying “please retweet” or
otherwise using the full word
retweet get as much as 23x
more retweets than tweets
that don’t ask at all.
• Using action words like
“download” or “claim” in your
content will boost your clickthrough rate by an average
of 13% over tweets without
such words.
• Tweets that have something
to do with Twitter directly
even seem to get 22.5%
more clicks than tweets
about other topics. Not that
you should be posting about
Twitter constantly, unless
you’re marketing a Twitterrelated product.
• Tweets with links are
astonishingly 86% more likely
to be retweeted than tweets
without.