Twitter have today announced that their self-serve advertising platform is open to businesses in the UK, Ireland and Canada.  This is big news; previously, advertising on Twitter was prohibitively expensive for many businesses but now, with access to the advertising platform, we can target Twitter users and manage our budgets. If you’re not yet ready to get stuck in, or are curious to know what it looks like, we’ve done the work for you.

Step One

Head to the Twitter Advertising page, where you’ll be met with this – just hit Get Started.

Step Two

Select the country you’re in (for billing purposes). Really important that you pay attention here as you cannot undo the selection that you save!

Step Three

Select the type of advert you wish to run. You have two options:

• Promote your tweets: this is where your tweets will appear in peoples’ Twitter stream. Ideal if you want to promote something or have a specific call to action. It mightn’t ramp up your followers but it will drive traffic and results. You’ll only pay when people engage (which in this case is when they tweet, retweet, reply, favourite or follow).
• Promote your account: useful if you’re looking to ramp up your follower count with people who are actually interested in what you do (as later, you’ll determine the search keywords under which you’ll appear). With this option, you’ll pay each time someone follows via the Promoted Account ad.

For this walkthrough, we are running a promoted tweet campaign.

Step Four

This is where some planning and thinking is required. It’s worth your while, before getting to this point to think about who and how you want to target. The options on this screen are:

• Campaign Schedule: By default, your campaign is set to run immediately. Think about if your campaign might be better if schedule during a specific date range.
•  Targeting – Keywords: by selecting this, you’re choosing to show your advert based on specific words that people search for, tweet about or engage with. Think about if this could be product related, event related or behaviour related. When selecting your keywords, Twitter will give you an indication of how popular or competitive that particular keyword is.
• Targeting – Interests and followers: a lot of the thinking is done for you here. Your ad will be shown to people with specific interests or who are similar to followers of specific accounts (which would work for competitor targeting).
• Appearance: You can select where your promoted tweet appears – in timelines or in search results.
• Technology: You are able to target devices and platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, mobile or desktop.
• Tweets: Instead of creating Tweets in the advertising platform, you select existing, already sent tweets.
• Budget: You are able to set a total lifetime budget as well as a per-day maximum. You then nominate the maximum amount you are willing to pay per engagement.

Step Five

You’re done! Your advert will now be live on Twitter for a fraction of the cost it once was.Have you run an advert yet? We’re curious to learn about it’s impact to businesses in the UK. Let us know!