Margot da CunhaFor anyone who pays attention to the stock market (which I don’t) or the news (which I do), it’s clear that Twitter hasn’t been looking so hot these days. Last month, the social platform fell short of its projected revenue for the first time as a public company. Somewhat embarrassing, right? Twitter’s much younger cousin Instagram even surpassed its monthly active user count when it hit 300 million monthly active users back in January.
With that said, I’m a HUGE fan of Twitter. I check it every morning and several times throughout the day. I’m a regular participant in Twitter chats, and use it to follow the news and connect with influencers in my industry. I honestly think it’s an insanely valuable tool for marketing one’s business as well as personal branding.
Unfortunately, my opinion is not reflected in the numbers, but Twitter has a plan to combat this. Just this week, there were announcements that Twitter is placing greater emphasis on revenue across its marketing efforts by putting their CFO, Anthony Noto, in charge of the department, as well as displaying tweets in the mobile search results pages on Google in the hopes of driving more traffic.
Twitter has also recently partnered with TellApart and DoubleClick, two platforms that will help marketers better target and track their efforts to ensure they’re receiving ROI from Twitter ads (in turn, spending more when they see results!).
Another component of Twitter’s revenue growth plan? Better serving marketers with objective-based campaigns. This is the one that I’m most excited about as a marketer.
Wednesday, Twitter announced the launch of objective-based ads for all advertisers globally. Twitter’s been testing these ad formats for almost a year now with a variety of businesses large and small, from eBay to data analytics company Tableau. The results have been noteworthy so they’ve decided now is the time to provide these valuable goal-based campaigns to all advertisers.
“The company believes these ads will ultimately increase revenue since advertisers are only charged for things that are valuable to them,” says Recode’s Kurt Wagner.
Twitter now offers six campaign objectives to choose from, including: tweet engagements, website clicks or conversions, app installs or engagements, followers, leads and video views (currently in beta).
Why You Should Test Twitter Objective-Based Campaigns
What’s the one thing marketers are consistently screwing up when it comes to social media? Posting without goals in mind!
Since social is still a new world for many marketers, they typically go in and throw some money at a Facebook post, crossing their fingers for results. Unfortunately, the results often fail to materialize and they put Facebook on the “non-profitable” list. Twitter is the same story, but now Twitter is making it easy for marketers to spend smarter.
As I said before, beta testers have seen real results. From eBay seeing a 59% quarter-over-quarter decrease in average cost-per-click, to digital agency Gupta Media seeing a 24% conversion rate – double the average it sees on other ad platforms – it’s clear these goal-based campaigns are proving effective for a variety of businesses, so why not give them a whirl? Twitter just may become your #1 social revenue generating platform.
Have you tried Twitter’s objective-based campaigns yet? I’d love to hear about your experiences.
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