Why to Use Twitter Ads

Top 5 Reasons to Use Twitter Ads

Twitter can organically build a marketing presence for a brand. Twitter ads have tremendous power to influence the purchasing decision of customers.

Imagine the power of using both organic and paid Twitter ads to help drive demand and awareness of your brand.

Social media has completely changed us. Most people are on social media not only to connect with their loved ones, but also to increase their brand awareness and visibility in the market.

Top Five Reasons to Advertise on Twitter

If you haven’t invested in Twitter ads, yet here are five reasons to use Twitter Ads:

Reason 1. You Pay for Success, Not Activity

When you promote tweets on Twitter, you pay only if you achieve your marketing objective.

No matter whether it’s focused on website conversions or Twitter engagement, you’ll only have to pay when people take action.

  • If your objective is to increase app installation, you pay only when apps are installed.
  • If your objective is to increase followers, you pay when people hit the follow button.

This is a great thing about Twitter ads – they take on some of the risk. Twitter has a firm belief that their ads will deliver accurately what clients need.

Other social networks like LinkedIn do not provide any pay-for-performance ads option. Even Facebook does not have this choice, but Twitter can really deliver if your goal is lead generation.

Reason 2. Twitter Ads Let You Target Keywords

Keyword Targeting is a vital and accurate way to target people based on displayed intent on Twitter.

You can target people based on keywords or hashtags they have used in tweets over the prior week / seven days.

Facebook, on the other hand, offers no keyword targeting at all. On Facebook, you can follow people who are engaged in AdWords as a topic.

On Twitter, you can get much more precise. For example, you can target #contentchat, the popular hashtag for marketers. Hashtags can help you to increase social media following.

Reason 3. Twitter Ads Can Outperform Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of the most popular ways to build a personal brand.

For this strategy to succeed, you need high level publications or blogs to publish your content, exposing you to their loyal readership. This extra visibility should lead to an increase in readers of your own blog or website.

But how much do you have to invest in that content? Let’s say a single post takes 2-to-3 hours.

If your time is worth $100 / hour, you are spending $200-$300 to create content that you are donating to another website for that visibility, which is the goal of personal branding in the first place.

Twitter ads can be more effective than guest blogging, and possibly at a fraction of the cost. This is especially true if you have existing content that you can pay to promote instead of churning out post after post.

Reason 4. You Can Customize Every Audience

On Twitter ads, you can target users who follow specific Twitter accounts owned by other users or companies.

To do so, you’ll need an app that helps you download a follower list for any Twitter account.

Using this information, you can create a custom audience to target with your Twitter ads.

Facebook also offers a custom audience option, but they require an email or phone number to build the audience. Twitter doesn’t do the same.

Market research is a vital factor to know your audience better. One of the popular and best tools for market research is Porter’s Five Forces.

Porter’s Five Forces is a market research model that provides an accurate report of Competition shaping an industry.

Porter’s Five Forces, first introduced in Michael E. Porter’s book of the same name, was originally performed to understand the industry and competitors in it.

This model can measure the demand-supply ratio of an industry. It gives precise details of competitive forces and their effect on the other competitors and overall industry dynamics.

1. Current Competition

Current Competition applies the companies that are operating in your niche when you enter the market. These businesses have an inherent advantage over any new entries to the market.

They are already familiar with customer needs and requirements. They even have explicit knowledge of the buyer’s decision process.

Experience and expertise are two factors that brands can earn over a period of time.

2. Potential Customers

Competitors check for possible brands that may enter the market. To insulate your company from any usurpers, stay on top of market health, overall economic health in the country, and the supply/demand trends in your particular industry.

Every brand should conduct in-depth market research to know if their service/product will be profitable or not. Industries showing positive growth will always draw in more competition, so keep an eye out for where potential threats may originate when conducting this research.

3. Supply-Side Power

This term describes how available an given product or service is elsewhere in the market. This analysis will help you map out suppliers, wholesalers, middlemen, etc.

You’ll want to have an idea of this end of the supply chain to ensure you will have a sufficient volume of inventory to support a successful business.

Take heed – for each new node along the supply chain, there will be a markup and therefore higher prices for end customers. This is why you should aim to find the lowest price on comparable goods before applying your own markup.

4. Buyer Power

Buyer power highlights the ability of customers to apply pressure on a business, in order to force compliance with a want or need.

Buyers can force lower prices, better customer service, or even better products at comparable prices. It will be helpful to understand the demographics and income range of your target audience so you can better anticipate when and where these demands might originate.

In this way, you can maximize customer engagement with your brand.

5. Threat of Substitution

All businesses face an ongoing threat that customers will simply lose interest in their offering, and find a suitable replacement product or service elsewhere.

Analyzing what threats of substitution might enter the fray will help you better understand things such as:

  • Accessibility of the brand for customers
  • Easiness to find an alternative brand
  • The uniqueness of product/service
  • Cost-effectiveness
  • How it can affect on Company’s ROI

And below is how we can apply this market research model to Twitter Marketing solutions. 

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis of Twitter

Review the original piece at this link, or simply read on to get the shortened version of it.

1. Competitive Rivalry

Ever since they were first introduced, social media platforms have been extremely competitive in the market.

Most of the platforms fail because of high entry barriers in the market. Incumbents continue to grow their offerings and feature sets, while some brands are incorporating social media functionality into their own websites.

Without ongoing innovation, any social media platform will be doomed to fail before long. Twitter is facing a solid competitive rivalry on an ongoing basis.

2. Threats of New Entries

The best social media platforms help avoid threats by staying creative and updating frequently. Twitter has done well at building user loyalty and a great brand image.

Nearly any business, publication, or other important entity has a profile on the platform. You can find them highlighted on the entities’ home pages.

This sort of loyalty and market penetration serves as a strong barrier of entry for newcomers. Twitter faces very little threat of new competitors entering the market space as of today.

3. Power of Suppliers

In this case, suppliers would be the vendors delivering the technical back end (hardware / software suppliers or Cloud hosting businesses, depending on how Twitter manages their infrastructure) and the users themselves.

The technology behind the platform is table stakes, and available from a large range of vendors at competitive costs.

Users, on the other hand, create the actual product itself, which is what they choose to tweet about. Their posts lead to impressions, which directly convert to revenue for Twitter.

Twitter does not hold any bargaining power. This means that the users hold the bulk of the power in this relationship.

4. Power of Buyers

Buyers / advertisers hold a great deal of power on Twitter.

Yes, there are plenty of social media platforms that can be advertising options, so Twitter has zero leverage with which they can increase ad prices to squeeze out more profits.

Switching to another platform like Facebook is easy. Therefore, the holders of the budgets also retain all of the power when it comes to Twitter ads.

5. Threat of Substitution

Due to the large number of social media platforms available, the threat of substitution is a real and tangible problem for all of them.

Because of this, every platform wants to maximize its total number of active users. Twitter has already had to change several things about how it operates to help discourage departures to other tools, such as increasing the maximum number of characters above its original limit of 140 per tweet.

Reason 5. Twitter Ads Are Worth Your Money

Twitter Ads aren’t free, but don’t panic about investing in them. Don’t forget that you’ll have to invest time and money even if you opt for guest posting. If that drove 200 clicks, you could likely equal it with $20 on Twitter ads.

Twitter will get you high visibility, which comes in handy when you’re hustling in search of a better return on your investment.

Because of all of the above listed advantages and benefits, it’s worth running a trial Twitter ad campaign to see whether or not it’s the right fit for you. In most cases, you’ll find that it is.

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Mary Jones

Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief at TopMyGrades
Mary Jones is the co-founder and editor-in-chief at TopMyGrades, which focuses on career counselling for university students in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Mary helps students with their marketing reports and assignments. She has extensive content editing experience and has worked with MSNBC, NewsCred and Scripted in the past. She has also authored blogs on Lifehack.org, Wn.com, Medium.com, Minds.com and many more digital publications.

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