Twitter’s New, Bigger Stage for Small Businesses

Got a small business? If so, Twitter wants you! In fact, Twitter recently made updates to help small businesses like yours.

How so? Twitter has made two key improvements that create a bigger advertising stage for small businesses: It expanded its self-service ad platform to provide you with the ability to better target users across the network; and it increased your access to social media analytics on the platform.

New Targeting Options

By harnessing the “big data” collected by Twitter, small businesses can broaden their audience by using “Promoted Tweets” to push their advertising messages. As you may know, this feature allows you to promote your account to users who are similar to your existing followers. But the new update to the platform enables you to send your Promoted Tweets to targeted recipients via several different criteria: location, interests, gender, and device. This puts a lot of marketing power into your hands, quickly and easily.

Let’s take a quick look at how each of these new targeting options work:

• Target by Interests: Twitter offers more than 350 interest categories to focus your ad efforts. This allows small businesses to send tailored messages to the Twitter users who will most likely retweet, reply, favorite, or click their promoted asset.
• Target by Device: Self-service advertisers can specify the exact devices (smartphone, tablet, desktop) for their Promoted Tweets. It even allows you to target based on the mobile operating system, enabling App marketers to target very specific audiences.
• Target by Location: The targeted location can be local, regional, national, or international. It also enables you to target multiple groups.

More Access to Social Media Analytics

Beyond expanded targeting options, Twitter now offers small businesses increased access to social media analytics. Specifically, you can access its advanced interface, which provides deeper campaign controls, more detailed reporting, and analytics data. In fact, it includes several dashboards that report on Promoted Tweets performance, timeline activity, traffic to websites, and more.

This new update will help self-service advertisers connect with potential consumers more efficiently. You will be able to gain valuable insights that will enable you to optimize your campaigns based on how users are engaging with the Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. The segmented analytics dashboards provide savvy advertisers with the information they need to optimize campaigns along any of the measurable criteria (interests, location, device/platform, and gender). In other words, it’s like taking A/B split marketing a few steps further to an A/B/C/D split that can be drilled down even further.

But if you are less experienced with internet marketing, Twitter’s self-service dashboard still has a lot to offer. It will give you basic, real-time metrics on how your Promoted Tweets are doing in terms of impressions, click rate, clicks, and ad spend.

Greater Insights Lead to Better Engagement

Overall, Twitter’s latest platform updates – new targeting options, and social media analytics – create a bigger advertising stage for small businesses to tap into. They should provide businesses like yours with greater insights about your most engaged audiences so you can further refine your marketing efforts on and off Twitter!