How to Use Twitter Ads to Promote Your Event

Social media has become a must if you want to successfully promote an event. Your social media event marketing strategy can include one or more of the top platforms.

Ideally, you should be on all of the following:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• Twitter

This article will focus on Twitter. More specifically, the sponsored content on the platform.

Read on to learn about:

• What you can do with Twitter Ads
• How to post an event on Twitter
• The different types of sponsored content
• Twitter promotion costs
• How to get started promoting your event on Twitter

Ready to tweet? Let’s do it.

What can you do with Twitter ads?

Twitter ads and sponsored content can help you spread awareness of your event.

The metrics are divided into the following categories:

1. Awareness: You can promote individual tweets so they get seen more.
2. Engagements: Promote tweets to increase the number of likes, replies, and retweets.
3. Followers: Promote your whole account to get more followers.
4. Website clicks: Direct people to your website to increase traffic.
5. App installs: If your event has an app, you can also get more people to download it.
6. App re-engagements: Re-target users of your event app to make them open it again.
7. Video views: If you have a promo video for your event, this lets you promote it.
8. In-stream video ads: You can promote a short video ad that runs before other videos.

You can of course also do a combination of all these if you’re not sure what works best for you.

The different types of sponsored content on Twitter

Twitters offers you several different options for promoting your event content. Three of them are very similar to other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

You can choose to promote individual pieces of content, or you can boost your entire account. You also have the option of making your promoted posts invisible to your current followers.

Let’s have a look at what you can do on Twitter.

1. Quick Promote

The first and most straightforward type of sponsored content on Twitter is the Quick Promote option. It’s similar to boosting a post on Facebook.

If you’ve tweeted something that had a particularly high rate of engagement, then you should use Quick Promote. Since it’s already popular, it will do even better with some money behind it.

2. Promoted-only tweet

The second kind of sponsored tweet is “promoted-only”. That means it won’t appear as a natural tweet on your account’s feed. Instead, it’ll only be seen by the audience you’re targeting.

This option is best if you’re trying to reach new audiences who aren’t following you yet. That way, they’ll find out about you, become your followers (hopefully), and register for your event.

3. Promoted accounts

If you’re not sure which particular tweets to promote, you can opt to promote your whole account. This option works very differently from the other two.

Rather than promoting a tweet, you’ll appear in suggested accounts. When people look at other accounts, you will appear at the top or right-hand side of their screen.

4. Promoted trends

The fourth option is to promote an entire trend. “Trends” are another word for hashtags, which can be viewed on the left-hand side of your home screen.

That can be particularly useful if you have a dedicated hashtag for your event. The “trend” will pop up under suggestions when people are browsing related hashtags.

Note that this is a very powerful method of promoting your event… and also very expensive. If you’re working on a smaller budget, promoted trends might not be the best option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OySu5aliYQc

How to get started

If you’ve had a go at Facebook or Instagram ads, then you’ll recognise most of the elements. Otherwise, it’s not a very complex system to become familiar with.

You have to define an objective and an audience, place a bid, and create the content itself.

1. Decide on your objective

The first step is to decide on the objective of your ads. Pick one or more from the five categories described above: awareness, engagements, followers, website traffic, or app installs.

2. Define your audience

Next, you choose the kind of audience you want to target. You can choose that based on their location, who else they are following, or what their interests are.

3. Place your bids

Twitter ads are based on a bidding system much like Google Adwords. You can choose to set a specific amount you want to bid. Or you can enable automatic bidding based on your budget and objective.

4. Set a budget

You can spend as little or as much as you want. There is no minimum. A good rule of thumb is to start with $30 per day, which will spread your budget nicely over a 24 hour period.

5. Write your tweets

It’s time to choose what to promote. Twitter recommends you pick 4-5 different tweets. You should include a call to action to get the most out of the promoted content.

6. Include a card

Alternatively, you can use a card for your event website or app. Cards are like images, but with a link embedded in them. They can be particularly useful for promoting an event.

Testing, testing

As with anything new, you’ll have to experiment with sponsored content on Twitter. It might take a while to find the magic sauce that gets your event noticed.

Remember, there are many factors that determine the success of your promoted tweets and content. If you don’t have a lot of luck at first, try tweaking it a bit.

• Target a different audience
• Write more engaging copy
• Use more compelling images
• Switch to video instead of images

A good idea is to do some A/B testing. Run two different ads simultaneously and see which one works best. You can, for example, keep the copy the same, but use different images.

Ready to get started?

We’ve covered the basics of event promotion on Twitter, so now it’s down to you to kick it all off.

If you need more information, then head over to Twitter where they have a comprehensive guide.

Happy tweeting!