The case for adding Twitter advertising to your budget this year

Facebook and Google remain powerhouses in online advertising, but Twitter is gaining ground in the social media space. Twitter reported $702 million in advertising revenue for Q3 2019 and reported 17% growth year-over-year for its Monetizable Daily Active Usage.

Aside from being a place where more marketers are spending their ad dollars, Twitter offers advertisers the opportunity to target audiences in different ways than Facebook. Options like follower lookalike and keyword targeting can often provide a better way to reach potential customers than interest targeting alone.

If you’re interested in adding or expanding your organization’s Twitter advertising budget in 2020, we have two case studies that show success using Twitter ads.

Note: For those hoping to run election-related ads in the future, Twitter announced a ban on political ads starting Nov. 20.

Case study: Twitter delivers more conversions than Facebook (2:1)

Last year, Hodges launched gated content in an effort to generate leads and bring those leads into our marketing flywheel. In the spring, we launched an eBook, “How Content Programs Have become PR’s Number One Strategy,” and in the fall, we shared our B2B Content Marketing Trends Report.

For both of these offers, we used social advertising to extend our reach with the hopes of attracting new contacts outside of our existing social network of followers and fans. To do this, we advertised across three platforms, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — using audience targeting to home in on those who would be interested in our content.

And for both offers, Twitter significantly outperformed both Facebook and LinkedIn, which surprised us because historically we’d experienced the opposite.

The conversion rate for Twitter ads related to the eBook was more than double that of LinkedIn. Twitter was also less expensive from a cost per conversion standpoint and resulted in better quality leads. 

Case study: Driving awareness traffic for 750% less per click

For one of our clients, we’re running a full-fledged paid media campaign that spans two social channels, search and display. While conversions by way of a contact form submission are an added bonus, our primary goal is to create an awareness and drive top of funnel interest.

We have ad campaigns that are set-up for a cold audience that meet our target demographic, with copy and creative that speak to our key messages. There is a remarketing component to this strategy, but for the sake of demonstrating success with piquing enough interest to click through to our client’s website to learn more, the results between Twitter and Facebook are astonishingly different.

Looking at a year’s worth of data:

Why do we think Twitter works?

In both of these cases, we believe a couple of factors created the right conditions for success.

First, our target audiences actively use Twitter. In the case of our Hodges ad campaign, those in the marketing, PR, communications industry regularly use Twitter, making it an ideal place to promote content that’s in line with what they coming to the platform to find.

Second, our ability to successfully reach the audiences we want to be in front of is made easier through things like Follower lookalike targeting and keyword targeting — options that are not available on other platforms.

Ultimately, our success is a matter of meeting our audience where they are and ensuring that our content is seen through paid advertising.