Why You Need to Sign Up for a Twitter Ads Account NOW

…or Full Targeting for Self Service Twitter Accounts if you’re into the Rocky & Bullwinkle alternate title thing.

If you’re following me on twitter, you would have noticed I used the word “holla” last night.  Not only that, but I misspelled it with extra a’s and put it in all caps.  Anyone of these three signs usually signal I boarded the SS Facetious.  But last night was 4 realsies, like OMG you guyz!!!

The News

Here’s what twitter announced that got me so excited:

Great news! Today, we announced more targeting options for your Twitter advertising. Based on your feedback, we added new features to connect you with the Twitter users most likely to be interested in your messages.

Target by interests: by @usernames and interest categories

• Target @usernames, to build an audience with similar interests to that @username’s followers.
• Choose from a wide-ranging list of 350 interest categories.

Target by device

• Tailor your content to reach users on laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones.

Target by gender

• Target by gender when you want to reach just the guys or just the gals.

 

Why These Twitter Ad Targeting Changes Matter

First a brief recap: we’ve talked about Twitter ads a couple times in the past and have a page dedicated to it on our site, but the short version is that Twitter has for a couple years now had its regular advertising accounts.  Particulars have changed over time as they made the accounts more robust, but the one thing that hasn’t is that you need to commit a fairly hefty amount of ad spend on contract to get approved (currently $15,000 to be used over three months).

Later on, twitter opened up a separate platform that they referred to as either Self Service or Small Business.  I prefer the Self Service moniker because there are plenty of larger businesses who want to be cautious about jumping into a $15k commitment before they see if a new advertising type works.

The problem with the Self Service version is that targeting options were extremely limited.  You could run either promoted accounts or promoted tweets, but you could basically only target by geography and some very limited interest-based targeting.  That’s all changed as Self Service advertisers now get the full array of targeting features available to full-service accounts.

So What are My Next Steps?

It depends on whether you’re currently a twitter advertiser or not.

Current Twitter Advertisers

The next time you log into your advertising interface, switch over to the new, more robust program.  Seriously, just do it.  It’s so much better, it’s not even worth discussing whether or not to do it.

Presto – you’re done!  Now you can target your Promoted Tweets campaigns to have ads appear in either timelines or search results.  For timelines, you can target by categories or by users who are similar to the followers of various twitter accounts – including competitors!  (Note that you are targeting similar users and not the actual followers themselves, although there will be some degree of overlap.)  Then you can target further by gender and specific devices in case you care how the person is using Twitter.

And one of the best parts of this new interface?  You can use targeted tweets that do not appear in your timeline.  That allows for much more creativity than before.

Twitter Account Owners Who are Not Twitter Advertisers

You’ll want to sign up for an advertising account, which you can do here.  Costs are low and there’s no minimum.  So there’s nothing to lose.  Even if you don’t think you’ll ever use any promoted twitter products, you’ll want to sign up, because…

Twitter Analytics Rocks

…now you get access to all their analytics.  I could do a separate post just on the analytics and probably will, but the key here is that you get the analytics reporting on everything – not just promoted products.  You’ll get to see how many followers you get, unfollows, interaction – including clicks – per tweet.  They’ll also get data about your followers and can get more details about who clicks to your Web site – even if they come from others’ tweets who don’t mention or follow you.

So there’s no downside.  Sign up or upgrade your promoted twitter account today!