Setting up a Twitter as account is actually fairly easy. If you'd like to do it, it really is as easy as having an existing Twitter account and going to ads.twitter.com. To actually start running ads, you're going to need to attach a credit card, but you can actually play around with a lot of the functionality without actually having to do that. The first big decision you need to make when deciding to run the Twitter app is how you want to pay. Twitter calls this the campaign objective and I think that's an accurate name. How do you want to measure success? The first way that Twitter offers is, tweet engagements. An engagement is any type of interaction that a consumer has with your tweet. It could be a like, it could be a favorite, it could be a comment, it could be simply clicking on your tweet, it could be clicking on the link to your tweet, it could be clicking on your profile, it could be clicking the "Follow" button. All of these things that could possibly be done to your tweet is considered a type of engagement. This type of Twitter ad is especially advantageous for folks that are interested in generating a discussion. Simply put, this campaign objective is really built to try to foster a discussion around your brand. So if you have a local event and you'd like people to get excited about it, one way to generate excitement might be through placing ads that are designed to try and garner engagement. I want you to think about the engagement option critically. What do you really gain as a business by getting a like? What do you gain by fostering a comment? Can you tie that to a tangible benefit? Again, if you're hosting an event and you have a strong reason to think that that event will succeed if more people get excited about it and generate a conversation, then engagement might be the model for you. However, if you really just want to draw people to your store or get people to buy your product online, Tweet engagements fall short of that. If you think of the marketing funnel, this is a much higher objective. Engagement is showing interest, but far from getting someone to do a specific action. If we're a local coffee shop, it might not make a ton of sense to garner engagement on our tweets. It may make a lot more sense to only pay for ads when people click to order a coffee online or click to visit our website to find more. If you have the opportunity to generate video content, Twitter offers a special objective geared around garnering video views. So if you really feel like your video is convincing, and interesting, and will drive people to your store, this is a special way to garner more interests around video views. This is unlikely to be the sole way in which you promote ads on Twitter, just because, unless all of your content is video-based, you'll probably want to drive specific objectives. Next, if we consider the awareness model, we really get into the cheapest way to advertise on Twitter. Awareness is, again, just eyeballs, only paying for people to see your content not paying for specific interactions or engagements. That being said, it is a way to generate as many people seeing your content as possible. Consider an awareness model when you're a new company. If you're a new local business and you'd like folks to just become familiar with your name and your branding for the first time, the awareness model may work very well for you and we'll work on a budget. However, if you'd like to drive specific behaviors, such as, folks clicking on your website, to buy a cup of coffee, consider using a different type of objective. Next, we have websites or conversions. This is the cost per action model that I mentioned earlier. This is paying for people to do specific things, such as, go to your website, or even go the whole way to buying a product on your website. This model is by far the most expensive way in which most businesses advertise on Twitter. But when you need people to do specific things or your business only benefits when people do specific things, this is the model to consider. If the only way I can justify doing Twitter advertisements is by people buying coffee on my website, such as buying a bag of coffee, then this is a goal that I really want to consider, because it's really the only way I can track success with my advertising spent. If you think about your social media advertising campaign and you can really get it down to specific actions really quickly in a small number of actions inside of that, then you really should consider using this model. It will cost you. Cost per actions on social media sites are always above a dollar. A common complaint I hear from marketers is that, this model is very expensive. Unless you are really benefiting in multiple dollars for every time someone does this action, it may be too costly for you. If you're a new business, you may want to garner a following on the platform. If I'm a local coffee shop and I seem to really have everything I need except for customers that regularly see my content, then paying for followers may not be a bad idea. Twitter has really aggressively tried to cut down on the bots that exist on the platform. As a result, you should have some level of confidence that the followers you gain are genuine people. However, I want you to exercise a little bit of caution here. Don't try to solely create Twitter ad campaigns that grow followers or don't do it as your only objective for an extended period of time. It's okay to grow your follower account, but I wouldn't set it as the primary objective of a social media campaign. Why? Because followers don't necessarily mean better business outcomes. I could have one million followers for my local Bolder coffee shop and if no more people come through the door, I am not doing better as a business. It's harder to map gains and follower accounts to actual real business objectives. In fact, in recent years, follower accounts in general to marketers has become what we call a vanity metric. That is, something that looks nice but generally doesn't map to true business success. Let's say you're a local pizza shop that has delivery through a specific app. You can actually pay only when folks install the app that you use to deliver and sale delivery pizzas. This is one unique way in which Twitter has offered deep integration into their platform. What I mean by that is, they make it easy, in fact, one click to download and install an app and get it on someone's phone. If this is a specific objective for you, then this is something to consider. However, most businesses don't have an app dedicated just to their product or service. So this isn't likely to work for the majority of folks. Along those lines, app re-engagements is paying for folks to do specific things or to reengage with that app that they've installed. So let's say you've gotten folks to install your pizza delivery app, the next step might be to actually get them to order a pizza. Subsequent campaigns can actually only be billed for cases when people actually use the app in that way. Overall, when considering objectives, I really encourage you to use a blend. That is to try different ones and see which ones work best for you. We'll look at the engagement data at the end of this lecture. You should be able to find that one objective tends to work better for your goals than another. That being said, many Twitter campaigns use a combination of different objectives to try to maximize the performance they get on the platform.
