Say a lot without speaking too much, that’s Twitter for you!

Twitter’s mantra is exactly that. It is interesting how Twitter has been used so successfully by marketers for their online campaigns, for organic as well as paid campaigns.

The advantage of Twitter is, the campaigns can use teaser ads on Twitter, build the interest and curiosity of their potential customers and then draw them to the landing page.

Twitter has quite a few options for advertisers, here is a brief overview of the options that advertisers can choose from:

1. Promoted Accounts:

Essentially for Advertisers who wish to boost their follower growth thereby building their brand value and as a result increase visitors to their website. The Promoted Accounts can be found on the left side of the home page as the “”Who to Follow” widget (as shown in the image above). Like all paid promotions on twitter, these accounts are also labeled “Promoted”.

2. Promoted Tweets:

These are essentially regular tweets the only difference being, the advertisers pay for these tweets. The goal is to increase or widen their reach and promote engagement since just like a regular tweet these tweets can be replied to, retweeted…

3. Promoted Trends:

Promoted trends are used by advertisers for context and event sensitive trends. You can find the promoted trends at the top of the trending topics on the left of the home page (as displayed above), just below the “Who to Follow” widget. They usually appear on the top and are clearly demarcated from the rest because they are marked as “Promoted”. 

4. Political Ads:

These are essentially paid advertising campaigns used by politicians to increase their reach and also engage followers.

Twitter has various ways of determining which tweets should appear on a user’s timeline. Based on relevancy to the user,  twitter determines relevancy on the basis of various signals they receive on who the users follow, what they retweet, which tweets they reply to , favorite…

For the sake of clearer understanding, let’s draw an analogy with Twitter Ads and Google Ad Words. This is just a basic outline, for details you may want to visit their advertising sections at “https://Support.twitter.com and “https://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/?fg=1” :

 

S.No	Topics	Twitter ADs	Google AdWords
1	Number of Characters	140	130
2	Layout	In the form of a sentence	Title, Description line1 Description Line 2, URL, and other enhanced options
3	Display	On the top of search results pages. It is different for Promoted accounts and Promoted Trends.	On the top and on the right of the SERPs.
4	Frequency of display	Only once for Promoted tweets	There is no cap on this
5	Pricing	Advertisers are charged for follows, retweet, replies, favorites, and clicks.	Charged on the basis of clicks.
6	Activity on Ads	Users can engage directly with the ads by following, replying, retweeting, clicking, making it their favorite etc.	Users can only click on the ads.
7	Landing pages	By clicking on the promoted tweets, users can land on the landing pages.	Users can land on the landing page by clicking on the Ads
8	Follows	Ability for users to follow	With Google+, it is possible
9	Option of dismissing an Ad	Available for promoted tweets	Option not available

This holiday season, along with other online advertising options, Tweet and be found!