Whether you are a small business looking to generate website leads, garner engagement through promotion outreach, or gain insight into the thinking of your target audience, Twitter is an excellent tool. Not only does it help thousands of small businesses reach clients via their cellphones and tablets, but the paid advertising platform, Twitter Ads, is giving small businesses a foot into the promotional world of Twitter’s social media platform.

What makes Twitter Ads so effective for small businesses is that it doesn’t take a long time to understand how to use them or how to launch them. With that said, here are a few tips for mastering Twitter Ads as a small business.

1. Always use objective-based campaigns. This requires you to figure out what you are ultimately trying to achieve up front. An objective can be anything from website traffic to sales conversions, to downloads, to engagement. The idea here is to select which objective campaign you want and ensure it aligns with your end goal. Twitter ads are great for expanding brand awareness, growing communities, and sharing product news. Depending on what outcome you want, the duration of the campaign, the target audience, country, and language will all vary.
2. Determine advertising type. There are several self-service advertising options on the Twitter platform for small businesses and choosing the right one will be pertinent to your growth. For instance, if you have a new event or product launch coming up, you may want to go with a promoted tweet as these appear on user’s timelines who specifically follow trending topics, hashtags, and similar interests.
3. Define and create your target audience. When using Twitter Ads, you will want to segment out your target audience by country, interests, gender, and device. Promoted tweets will allow you to further divide your target audience by keywords. By using the deep segmentation of Twitter Ads, you can create highly tailored campaign lists that target niche audiences. This ensures that every ad you create is high-quality, hand-tailored, and creative. This is a crucial step as this determines who can see your business promotions engage with them.
4. Even as a small business, you can still be generous with your daily ad budget. The reason being is that the ads will never exceed your set budget as you only pay for followers and re-tweets. Bear in mind though, like any other platform; these ads are not the “set it and forget it” type. You’ll need to monitor your analytics via Twitter’s free tools and modify your campaign after it has launched if you are not getting the results that you want (engagements, conversions, traffic, etc.).
5. Always measure campaign results. Because Twitter Ads run on a pay-per-click (PPC) system, you can measure the metrics through the click rates that you receive. The higher the click rate, the more successful your ad has been. Obvious, right? Just remember though, that it may take a fair amount of tweaking before you find what works best for your business. This means that you need to keep testing and using different creative approaches. Use varying copy in each campaign such as different lists, messages, links, and visuals.

Finally, embrace the real-time capabilities of Twitter and the open-network that it is. The greater majority of profiles on Twitter are public, meaning businesses automatically have a wider audience selection. When this is combined with the real-time targeting capabilities of the social media platform, advertising becomes incredibly powerful. Individuals are looking for real-time events, tweets, and promotions which small businesses can easily leverage at a relatively low cost per click.