Promoted Accounts: 3 Tactics for Driving Followers, Aligning Them to Your Target Audience

How to Get the Most for Your Ad Dollars Using Promoted Accounts

Promoted Accounts may seem like an on/off switch where once you open the floodgates, you get as many new followers as you’re willing to pay for and at high volumes within minutes. Volume doesn’t necessarily mean quality, though. Promoted Accounts can definitely bring in a high volume of followers, but Twitter also equips their advertisers with multiple features to help filter these followers. While generic terms might boost the volume of followers you see in a short period of time, these might not be the most qualified subset of the Twitter population for your specific brand. This is why it’s a good idea to test more than one campaign at a time and a varied set of targeting criteria. Twitter automatically targets users who already follow accounts similar to yours, but as an advertiser, you have the option to narrow your ad targeting even further under the “Targeting Criteria” section in each of your campaigns.

Twitter’s Promoted Products is robust, advanced and powerful, but making the most of every dollar is up to you as the advertiser. Treating Promoted Products as just an automated ad platform, or checking in once every two weeks will get you satisfactory results. To get great results, you’re going to have to put in the extra legwork and test multiple campaigns until you find the sweet spot for your brand and target audience.

It took us a couple weeks to really get our feet wet and learn successful techniques, but now that we’ve started seeing significant improvements in our performance we wanted to share our findings.

3 Twitter Campaign Tactics to Attract Your Target Followers

Here are three different campaign tactics we’ve run and seen success from, both in terms of volume of followers and “follow rate.” Follow rate refers to Twitter’s proprietary metric in their Promoted Accounts Dashboard, which appears to be based on the number of users who follow you relative to the impressions generated for each of your campaigns and profile views. According to Twitter, a .1%-.3% follow rate is a sign of a high-performing campaign. The tactics below revolve around strategically setting ad targeting criteria for individual campaigns. As we mentioned last week, Twitter recommends running two to three Promoted Accounts campaigns at a time, which is also helpful when testing different tactics, so as to be able to know what’s working and accurately assign attribution to successful vs. ineffective tactics. The more specific, targeted and relevant you set your targeting criteria, the better your chances are for attracting your target followers.

1. Competitor keyword targeting: Create a list of your top competitors, mid-to-low competitors, and related, but not direct competitors. Try testing a variation of all of these, starting with your top competitors, for one of your campaign’s targeting criteria. Since these aren’t generic, highly competitive keywords, set the bid lower to start (min. bid per follower for Promoted Accounts starts at $0.50). So far, we’ve seen our best follow rate from campaigns we’ve run using competitor keyword targeting, though the volume of followers is much lower than other types of campaigns, like those using highly competitive keywords.

2. Branded and/or low-competition target keywords: Try testing your branded keywords, keywords you’re trying to rank for and some of your top target keywords that have a small-to-medium competition. In order to select these keywords, we use Optify’s Keywords Application, filter by our top target keywords that are less competitive, but still have a reasonable number of monthly searches. Just as with your competitor keyword targeting, set the bid on the low end for this campaign. This is the second most effective tactic (from this list) we’ve tested in terms of follow rate and volume of followers.

3. Highly competitive keywords: These are your more generic target keywords that have the highest competition, and therefore higher bid rates. Our highest volume and most quickly acquired followers have come from this type of campaign, although we’ve also seen the lowest follow rate from these campaigns. Granted, it was still within Twitter’s suggested range for good follow rates, just at the low end of the scale.

Stay Tuned for More Updates!

Now that you have a list of campaign tactics to try out and know a few metrics to look for, the next step is understanding all the other measurements that determine the success of those campaigns. Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post on metrics you can use to track your advertising efforts in realtime. We’re still just in our first month testing Promoted Products, so make sure to check back on our blog for more updates on our progress or follow us on Twitter to hear the latest about our experience.

Disclaimer: We’re not able to provide screenshots of Twitter’s Promoted Products because of our privacy agreement with Twitter. We’ll provide these as soon as we’re given permission.