Twitter recently made changes to its ‘Promoted Tweets’ function. So how can you navigate these changes and what do they mean for you?

First, let’s look at how to create a traditional Twitter campaign:

Log into your Twitter account and navigate to the dropdown menu on the top right. Click on ‘Twitter Ads’ and you’ll be directed to a landing page asking you what your campaign objectives are; whether you want more interaction on your Tweets, website clicks, followers, app installs, etc. From there, name your campaign, select your audience, set a budget, and craft the Tweet. Alternatively, you can select an existing Tweet to promote.

Promoted Tweets can bring attention to your content, expand your reach and enable you to connect with your audience. These Tweets appear in search results, in timelines, and on user profiles. Users can dismiss these Tweets but that doesn’t stop them from seeing ads in the future.

When it comes to pricing, Twitter has an interesting model. Twitter ads is described as an ‘action based system’, meaning your budget and a bid you place determines the price of your campaign. Twitter has an automatic bidding function which places the lowest bid within your campaign objectives, or you can manually bid, paying slightly higher than the second highest bidder.

However, perhaps take a moment before rolling out your promoted Twitter campaign. Twitter has recently introduced ‘conversational ads’, encouraging customers to interact with branded questions. These ads can be targeted just like any other promoted tweet. While conversational ads are in beta testing at the moment, when fully available Twitter has estimated, based on early testing, that they can generate five times the average engagement rate.