Ads best practices

We talked to Twitter Account Managers and ad experts to understand what the ultimate best practices are across all campaign objectives. Here are our top actionable tips to help you achieve success in your next Twitter Ads campaign.

01 Strategy

When planning campaigns, look for opportunities to share your latest news and connect with the conversation of the moment. To learn more about each:

Launch on Twitter

Whether you’re launching a new brand, product, app, message or promotion, Twitter is proven to help brands meet launch KPIs.

Tips for successful launches on Twitter

Build a four-part phased approach:

Listen

Align existing consumer insight to Twitter’s audience or engage Twitter to find a new audience insight.

Tease

Create buzz, awareness, and a targeting pool of influential early engagers.

Reveal

Drive mass awareness of your launch, spark conversation, and surge your message to the masses.

Reinforce

Reinforce your launch message post-reveal to drive preference and maintain buzz to keep your brand top-of-mind.

• Schedule your entire launch campaign to run 3-6 weeks for +51% higher lift in top-of-mind awareness and +15% lift in brand awareness, or 7-10+ weeks for +68% higher lift in favorability and +26% lift in intent
• Optimize launch exposure frequency for your campaigns. 80% of the impact happens within the first 2-3 exposures per week
• Use 3-5 ad formats to drive the best results, and choose the formats that coincide and complement with your campaign objective
• Use Twitter’s Takeover ad products (Timeline Takeover and Trend Takeover/Trend Takeover+) to maximize awareness leading up to or on launch day
• Add custom executions (Conversation Buttons, Branded Notifications, and Branded Hashtags) to up-level your campaign and make your Tweets more engaging

Connect with what’s happening on Twitter

Twitter is where brands can connect to the events, occasions, and trends people talk about most.

Use Twitter to connect with what’s happening and build cultural relevance

Events, movements, and conversations happen everyday that shape our culture. In these moments, people and brands raise their voices to express their opinions. They’re connecting with what’s happening. 

With record user growth, the most real-time conversations, and premium, brand safe content, Twitter is the best place to build relevance by being part of the conversation.

And it’s not any conversation — it’s the conversation that shapes what’s happening in culture, thanks to our influential and receptive audience.

Ways to connect with what’s happening on Twitter

Twitter is where the biggest cultural moments play out, and where the world turns to watch and talk about them. Here are three key ways brands can connect with what’s happening.

Events

Twitter is the roar of the crowd for events. Across sports, news, and entertainment, the opportunity for brands to connect has never been better.

Occasions

From virtual celebrations, to Valentine’s day, to holidays – occasions are great opportunities for brands to connect.

Trends

Join the surge in conversation around topics and trends that are accelerating to build relevance.

Tips for how to connect on Twitter

Build a four-part phased approach:

Immerse

Uncover the ins-and-outs of the topic and get familiar with the pulses of conversation: the themes, highlights, and anticipated moments.

Hype

Seed your message and build on the anticipation by naturally building association with the topic.

Participate

Take part in the peak of the conversation.

React

Take advantage of the short window after the peak to gradually phase out of the conversation.

• Expand your campaign run time beyond just the event day to yield 2X more engagement, +35% greater view through, and 3X better cost efficiency
• Find your opportunity for cultural relevance in the overlap of your target audience, brand story, and topic of connection. What can you say that allows you to participate in the conversation while adding value?
• Use the immerse phase to prepare and organize your content, while using the other three phases to Tweet your planned content. Anticipate possible new content during the participation phase, and prep reactive content for unexpected changes during the participation and react phases.
• Use 3+ ad formats to drive +20% campaign awareness and +7% purchase intent
• Use premium Twitter Ads products to maximize impact, such as Twitter Amplify, Video Ads, Polls, Conversation Buttons, Website Buttons, Timeline Takeover, and Trend Takeover/Trend Takeover+

02 Tweet copy

Keep it concise

The best performing Tweets are only 50-100 characters.
Make sure your Tweet is  simple, gets straight to the point, and focuses on one clear message.

Include a strong call-to-action

Be clear and straightforward with your desired action and explicitly say “follow us”, “click to read more”, or “reply with your favorite [insert here]”.
This practice is especially important for follower and engagement campaigns, but is a best practice for all campaign objectives.

Convey a sense of urgency

Give people a reason to take immediate action and visit your site, download your app, or follow you.
Do you have a limited time offer or sale you’re promoting? Are you offering a discount to the first 20 people who reply t your Tweet or sign up for your newsletter? Think about what unique value you’re bringing to the table and narrow in on that.

Avoid unnecessary exit points

Whenever possible, keep your ad free of #hashtags and @mentions. We know that it’s tempting, but they’re distracting, clickable opportunities that drive people off your ad and away from your content. Provide only one exit point, whether that’s clicking through to your website or your app, to keep your message laser-focused.

03 Images

Incorporate strong visuals

97% of people focus on visuals on Twitter, so it’s important that yours is eye-catching and features your product or key message. And whether you’re using an image, GIF, or video, make sure that there’s a clear connection between your imagery and your Tweet copy. 

04 Video

Keep it focused

Wherever possible, aim to include at least one video in your campaign. Among all creative formats, video is one of the strongest and fastest-growing medium on Twitter. 

Here’s our top video tips:

• Cap your video at 15-seconds or less to maximize branding impact and higher completion rates. For pre-roll campaigns, remember that viewers have the option to skip your video after 6 seconds.
• Show movement in the first few seconds to grab attention quickly.
• Include captions or text-overlay so that you can still get your message across to mobile or sound-off viewers.
• Include clear branding within the first three seconds of the ad, if not for the full length. Video ads with clear logo placement drive 30% higher unaided brand recall.

05 Campaign optimization

Start with auto bid

Your bid is one of the main factors that determines how frequently your ad is shown to your audience, and starting with auto-bid will help ensure your bid is competitive in the auction and will be served.

Make sure to monitor your bids and once you get initial learnings, increase your bid for well-performing campaigns or that are close to but not quite meeting your goals.

Run multiple Tweets and vary your creative

Using 3-5 different ad formats has been shown to drive brand lift, campaign awareness, and purchase intent⁴. As an example, you might run a Video Ad, a Video Ad with a Website Button, a Tweet with an image (can even be a high-quality still from the video), and a plain-text Tweet. 

Use this opportunity to also test your tone and overall aesthetic across your ads. Take a risk and get a little playful or witty in one of your Tweets to see how your audience responds.

Explore different targeting options to find your audience

For initial campaigns, try keeping your targeting broad. After a couple weeks of learnings, you can see which audience groups your content is resonating most with and continue building off that. Use Tweet Engager targeting to remarket to groups who’ve engaged with your past content.

If your campaign ties into a larger conversation (i.e. connecting with an upcoming holiday or current trend), try using Twitter’s unique conversation targeting to reach people who are active in those conversations.

Monitor and adjust

Periodically check on your campaign performance while it’s still in-flight and make adjustments to keep it on the path to success. Replace under-performing Tweets and targeting with fresh alternatives. 

After making edits, wait two to three days to allow the learnings to process and see results. If it still continues to underperform after that, pause or delete the campaigns and try again.