Now, let's talk a little bit about the ads themselves. What is it about a Twitter app that tends to make it better or worse? One of the common flaws that I see in smaller types of Twitter ad campaigns is the inability to identify yourself. I think it's really important that you build content that actually uses and leverages your brand in a meaningful way. The problem with this ad is that there really isn't good branding, we're not sure what the cleaning product is, and, in fact, if we don't squint we might not see it at all. Knowing that folks only look at Twitter ads for a second or so, it's not really likely that people will be left with a meaningful impression of the brain. Even if awareness is the goal here, we're probably not impressing on our customers that they just saw an ad for our cleaning product. In short, be clear in identifying yourself. I want to unpack a little bit more about what the advertiser was thinking here. It's actually a unique idea. So this John Bostic person is an influential person on Twitter. So the idea here for this cleaning product is to leverage influential people and promote their tweets. There is an idea there that makes sense, if we promote it from an influencer as opposed to our main brand account, we actually have the ability to skirt some of the ad skepticism that we see with just straight traditional ads. If this ad was just for a cleaning product, then, yes, it would be met with a higher level of skepticism than an influencer's account. But what we lose here is the actual ability to know what the cleaning product wasn't in a second, and that might actually help weigh this somewhat less skeptical way to serve an ad. All those might conceive this as deceiving as well. If the product is great, why can it stand on itself? Why does it need to be promoted by an influential person? This ability to leverage tweets from influential people is interesting and unique to Twitter. What I mean by that is, you don't actually have to own the account that you promote a tweet from, you do need to go through a formal approval process where you essentially are allowed to promote tweets. So John Bostic had to allow this cleaning products to actually promote his tweet, but that was a simple link that was sent via email and a one-click button type deal, it wasn't that big of a lift. This is unique and not all social media platforms work this way. Some social media platforms say you can only promote posts from the accounts that you own. For instance, LinkedIn, largely works this way for the newsfeed content that it serves. So I appreciate this idea, but I think the sacrifice of losing that brand identity really might outweigh that broader skepticism skirting approach here of leveraging an influencer's post. Good Twitter ads have good calls to action. What I mean by that, is they give people concrete things that they should do as a result of seeing the app. Here's a pretty straightforward example, and this is Nike saying, "If you go to our website and you use the code play 30, you'll save $30." This is a straightforward appeal. It gives people a concrete action. It drives them to complete that action by giving them a monetary discount, and it does so in a way that just really hits them over the head. This ad has one goal, and that's to get people to go to the website and buy something. If that's really what Nike wants the most, then this ad is successful. Try to avoid ads on the platform that are fake. Even if your primary goal is to just get people aware of your coffee shop, always have something in mind that you want to drive to, whether it's just encouraging them to come into the store and mentioned this offer for a dollar off their next cup of coffee, or whether it's to get them to click on the website and learn more about where the locations are or about the types of coffee you offer. Always have a specific action in mind. If you can't think of the action when you're generating your Twitter content, it's probably worth taking a step back and thinking about what could actually move the needle for your small business. This could be said for all social platforms, but imagery is important on Twitter. Not just having an image, but having an image that draws attention, it actually draws the reader in to actually want to understand what the content is, is important. This can be done in several ways. A creative class might really dedicate a whole Coursera to learning about why an images are compelling or interesting versus not. But some ways to do it is by really making sure that your imagery is crisp, has sharp contrast, has good use of color, is unexpected in some way, such as, something that they wouldn't expect to see in their news feed, or is in other words, just unique. That is really what you're shooting for when you're thinking of Twitter imagery. Don't consider broader categories such as beauty as something that's interesting. It needs to stand out on its own. How can you generate content that is unlike the typical day-to-day social media content of the people that you're sending the ad to. That's the way to garner attention. This ad caught my eye because of the strong polarization in the lenses, that contrast really popped out of the screen. I'm looking at Twitter with a dark background, so when I see a bright color, it's just a visual cue for me to focus and to pay attention. This is a great example of using strong photography. It's always worth investing in photography, even if it's just having someone come into your shop for one day to really generate interesting visuals through photographs, it's almost always going to pay off in the form of social media ads. Remember that, there are thousands and thousands of messages that even one person might see on social media a day. So you really have to rise to a pretty high bar to get people to pay attention. People are programmed to ignore the majority of social media content they see. If they didn't, it would be a chaotic world. Imagine a world where you had to understand every social media post or at least process every social media post before you move forward on the platform, you'd burn out after reading a dozen posts. Most people scroll through content passively, and as a result, we really need to be careful in generating content that comes in, our contents should be stark, and it should stand out. Further progress could be made on this tweet. The logo here couldn't have higher contrast. Timeliness is key on Twitter. As I've mentioned before, it's really important to be in the here and the now with Twitter content. So if you've got a show and it's airing tonight on a TV station, then you want to be doing those advertisements just before the show starts or even right as the show is starting. You don't want to do it a week before, you don't want to even do it a day before, because Twitter is for the here and the now, people are looking for content that is timely. For your businesses, it can mean a number of things. A sale that's happening at this very moment, a special that you have today. A promotion that is applicable now, or news that is just breaking or relevant in a timely way. Timeliness is key when you're considering Twitter ads. There are several major limitations that I want you to consider. First, it's costly. We've already touched on this idea that social media advertising generally is not the cheapest way to drive results. Sometimes, we have to accept that limitation, in that, it might be the best way even though it costs more, but the next most important thing that I really want you to consider if you take away one thing of one major limitation of Twitter and most social media platforms is, the inability to quantify intent. So I'll use purchase intent as the primary example here, but you could really think of intent broadly for a number of type of consumer behaviors. Think of purchase intent as someone actually willing to buy the product the moment they see the ad. Social media advertising, no matter how much data goes into whether we serve an ad to someone or not, will never have the purchase intent of Google AdWords. We may serve coffee ads to people that love coffee, but we're never really going to know right when they want the coffee. We only know that there are more generally interested in. We may know that, at certain times of the day, people are more likely to have coffee and we may serve our ads at those times, still, we don't know if they brought their coffee from home that day. AdWords will always outperform in this way. People Google the things that they want the moment they want them. Now, that being said, I don't Google that I want a cup of coffee every time I want it. However, when I do Google it, I definitely want it. Social media advertising is always going to suffer and that we really don't know when the magical time to reach someone is, we only know of their broader interests outside of time or outside of their day-to-day. I list purchase intent here, but there are other types of intents, such as, just general research intent. So I might want to research what the best coffee shops are in boulder. Again, with social media, I don't know when people are in the market to do that research. I only know that they're broadly interested in it overall. This is a major limitation of all social media advertising. Facebook has married and has made an aggressive attempt to combine lots of browsing behavior data to try to get an intent. Twitter has been in able to combine these data sets and create this broader ecosystem of tracking. So therefore, it is not as positioned to capture people in those perfect moments. I think that really ties to our next major limitation of Twitter. People generally only target based off of heuristics, such as, who someone follows. Again, as we said, that can be accurate, and in some cases, it may not be accurate. They also target off of things that they tweet. So if I tweet about pizza, I may really like pizza, but a lot of people like pizza that don't tweet about it. Finally, Twitter doesn't have this broader collection of data from consumers. It doesn't know what they're doing outside of the platform to the same extent that Facebook does. As a result, we don't know whether someone's in market for a cup of coffee on Twitter, whereas, we may know it to a greater extent with Facebook. Really consider this as a major limitation. The data we have on Twitter is good in many ways. In fact, it's probably more local than any other social media platform. That being said, it's not the most exhaustive set of data, and as a result, there are going to be ads that you serve to people that just aren't relevant. It's hard to get ultra precise with Twitter ads and know that you will reach people that are just not in market at that time, or not relevant to you generally. You can see here, if we look at the relevant e-marketing statistics for perceived Twitter ad relevance, this is a 2015 study. You can see here that most people, 45 percent of people say, "No, the ads I see on Twitter aren't exactly that relevant to me." Whereas, only 30 percent of folks think the ads are okay. So more people than not find ads on Twitter to be irrelevant. This is really important for you to understand and for you to know, that when you're building Twitter ad campaigns, you're really going to be spending the majority of the time honing relevance through ad targeting parameters. You're going to have to play with many different iterations of parameters and you're going to want to assess the relevance through the engagement metrics. The first attempt will most certainly not be the most effective way in which you target ads to your consumers, you must know that Twitter ads are an iterative process and playing around with the ad manager does take a little bit of trial and error.
