Recently, Twitter opened up its ad platform to everyone, so instead of having to spend a few grand on a campaign you can spend few quid instead. I recently ran a small campaign on Twitter for myself to try out the system and I think it’s something everyone should do. Here are three reasons why:
Metrics, metrics metrics
Run a single ad for the briefest amount of time and you get access to Twitter’s analytics for your account. It shows every tweet, tracks every click, shows how many people followed you and unfollowed you on a particular day. It’s all the analytics you want, delivered from direct from Twitter without having to generate special links or bring in third-party tools.
The system highlights your best performing tweets, it highlights those with the greatest reach and so provides a simple and useful way to identify what’s really cutting through with your audience.
Who follows me?
Within the analytics there’s a useful follower breakdown. It tells you the topics that your followers are most interested in, charts follower growth and shows where your followers are in the world. It also shows that 71 percent of my followers are men and only 29 percent are women. That stat really shocked me. It’s something I hadn’t really expected and something I’m keen to address.
The follower breakdown, particularly the topics analysis, is useful in terms of working out the areas your followers are interested in. Some of these may surprise you. As a result, I’m certainly going to feed out a few tweets on topics I don’t normally cover, because I didn’t think people would be interested in them.
A good first impression
Once you’ve run a paid for campaign, you can run a free campaign forever. It’s caled pinned tweeting. It means that when someone looks at your twitter profile, either on desktop or one of Twitter’s own apps, the first tweet they see will be one you’ve chosen rather than whatever your last tweet was. So no more odd tweets that need to be read in context at the top of your profile’s timeline.
There are lots more useful tools like linking websites, building cards and tracking conversions with tags that have useful benefits, but after you’ve spent your fiver (in theory you could just spend a penny), these three benefits are available for no ongoing cost whatsoever.