blog advertising twitter ads promoted tweets

Advertising a blog using Twitter ads and promoted tweets

Gavin Wren Food Blogging, Writing

Ad Men

This month I decided to look at some different ways to and increase the readership of my blog. I considered various techniques that help to raise the profile of a blog, especially through social media. My personal favourite social media channel is Twitter, simply because of the way you interact with other people through words, rather than images. Don’t, however get confused with my favourite for driving traffic, which is undoubtedly Pinterest. Something that kept on coming back to me was Twitter Ads, mainly because I keep on getting a Twitter ad, for Twitter ads, flashing up in my Twitter feed, trying to entice me into the world of paid advertising. If I were able to promote my Twitter feed in this way and get a few more people on board, then hopefully the word of le petit oeuf will be able to spread far and wide.

Now, I normally associate online advertising with big budget PR campaigns or brands who can apportion a large chunk of money to fuel their advertising, which is largely why I’d ignored it until now. Using Twitter ads to help build a blog’s audience seemed like an unusually professional thing to do in my amateur, unfunded blogging world.

So I did it, I dived in, guessing the only way to find out is to try it. I set up an ad campaign, which targeted a demographic as closely matched to the current audience of my blog as possible. You can refine by country, language, gender, age, interests, even by similar users, so that you know you’re definitely targeting people who are already digging other Twitter users who produce similar content to yourself. After that, you need to try and create some hooks for them to follow and then leave it up to the Twitter machine to publish your tweets.

The details

There are a huge stack of options to cover, I’ll outline the major ones, but you can tweak some of these even more delicately in several other sub categories.

1. Location

I went for UK, Canada, US and Australia, the four English speaking countries which I associate with my current followers the most.

2. Gender

Female. Again, I know from other data that a large percentage of followers of my blog are female.

3. Language

Well, it had to be English really.

4. Followers

Here you can target users with interests in similar accounts. I selected six popular blogs from the UK and US who have certain similarities with the food I create, as well as large followings on Twitter. In this area it’s probably important to refine your selection to the blog whose content is most aligned to your own.

5. Interest

You are presented with a vast array of interests to target, so I selected a batch which I felt aligned with my blog: Cooking, Ethnic foods, Foodie news and general info, Vegan, Desserts and baking, Vegetarian, French, Italian, Mexican cuisine.

6. Budget

I had no idea what to do here. There’s no way I wanted to spend more than £50 on this, so I set my daily spend at £5, with a total budget of £50, meaning I could run the campaign for 10 days. There is no set pricing here, your advert cost varies depending on where and when it is posted. Twitter handles this automatically for you, meaning it will aim to get the best value for money when it places your ads. Alternatively, you can choose maximum bid, which simply means you put in how much each new follower is worth to you and it will go out and get them. The guideline it gave me for this option was £1.65 to £2.32 per follower, which is way out of my league! It’s worth noting however that your bid is a maximum, you’ll never pay more than you bid, usually you’ll pay less. Now, £1.65 per follower is WAY more than I can afford to pay for a follower, so I set it to automatic bidding and crossed my fingers.

7. Creatives

This is arguably one of the most important parts of the campaign. Here you have the opportunity to compose your ‘hooks’, the tweets which will be promoted as part of your campaign. You need creative, enticing text to get people to engage with what appears on their feed. Images are a bit of a no-no unless you are 100% sure it’s going to get people in. This is very important, and looking back, I feel I could have improved on what I posted, because I just cringed a little when I read them! See below:

Twitter ad creatives tweets blog examples

Once you’ve gone through all of those, you’re set to go. You hit start on the campaign and leave Twitter to post your promoted tweets whenever it feels the moment is right. You get access to a cool campaign analytics page which plots impressions, engagements, spend and conversions, so you can see how your Twitter promotion is going down and it’s quite fun to keep an eye on it as things progress.

Twitter ad campaign blog analytics

My cost per follower started pretty low, about £0.30 per follower, so I felt I was seeing great value, but it crept up and after a few days was at £0.68 per follower, with a total spend of £18.33, at which point I pulled the plug. I’d love to grow my blog and get a bigger readership, and social media is a great way to do that, but at anything up to £2 per follower, you need deep pockets to be able to really benefit from Twitter ads, which is something bloggers rarely have. If you wanted to gain 1000 new followers, you’d probably need to budget up to £1000, which as an amateur is probably better spent on things like photography equipment and website upgrades. Spending some time, every day to gain followers by simply being on the social networks yourself is probably more efficient if you don’t have a budget to work with.

Twitter ad campaign blog outcomes

Conclusion

So, are Twitter ads a good way to gain followers and grow your blog? I don’t think so. Unless your blog is very commercial in it’s conception and has a good budget to work with, then I would stick to either solid, consistent engagement or using apps like crowdfire to help reach more people. If you’re a company or promoting a product, or if you need to grow your following very quickly, then I think you could see some great engagement through Twitter ads if you are able to set a high daily budget.


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