By Alan Coleman on 4 Mar 2014
Ah the oul Tweet machine. Some people love it. Others don’t (really, what’s with them?). Twitter ads were launched on a self-serve basis in Ireland back in November. I’ve had lots of fun implementing some Twitter campaigns for a number of clients. Some of my promoted tweets have had engagement rates of upwards of 30%!
1. It offers a great way to reach a really relevant audience Twitter is a brilliant way to target really relevant audiences. For example, the lads took themselves off to SES London recently. The hashtag associated with the conference was #SESLondon. Alan and Brendan were getting on stage at 11.45. I knew they would be finished by 12.30. I closed my eyes and thought of all the search marketers all over the world that would be sitting at their laptops following the SES London hashtag. We really want to build the Wolfgang brand internationally. This was a great opportunity for us to target relevant people with a tweet at the top of that feed. So I did that. I promoted a tweet with a link to our blog which hosted a SlideShare of the lads’ slides. We were really surprised that there was only one other brand advertising on that SES hashtag. 
Obviously, this Tweet was only relevant for a short time after the presentation, but you can see that it had an engagement rate of 8.51% in the hour we ran the campaign for. We did another campaign promoting our DMA predictions infographic, and some of our Tweets (we were split testing using small budgets) saw engagement rates of over 12%... 
We have also run a campaign for another Irish company which targeted the JNLR hashtag the day the JNLR results were published. We saw stats of over 26% engagement... 
2. Lead generation cards Lead generation cards are a great way of collecting new email addresses. This is what they look like… 
All people have to do is click on your call to action button and boom, they are on your mailing list J You can also promote these cards so if you’ve got a decent budget, this could provide a great means towards a solid email subscriber list. And we all know how great email is for direct response… 3. Not many people are using it…in Ireland Seriously, the number of people engaging in Twitter advertising in Ireland is miniscule. This means that – for the time being – Twitter advertising is a great way of getting noticed on the platform. So what are you waiting for? Get your Tweet on (too cheesy?)! Have a play around with Twitter advertising and let us know how you get on! Have you had any great successes? With Mother's day coming up, it is a great opportunity for retailers with great content to piggyback of trending hashtags. There are also a number of sporting events that will have hashtags that you can target if it is a fit for your industry. If you are an expert in pancakes, you're sorted - it's been trending for days!
