How to optimise your follower campaigns at 99.96% cheaper than Twitter suggests.

Growing your audience organically on Twitter takes a lot of time and effort. Fortunately for us, Twitter allows us to run "Follower Campaigns" which if set up correctly it can increase your follower count by thousands in just a few days. 

The problem is that it is extremely expensive to acquire new followers when selecting your target cost per a follower, Twitter suggests that you bid between R32,46 – R45,44. Now If you only have a budget of R1000, Twitter is suggesting that you will only get a measly 30 followers. In my eyes, this is absolutely ridiculous. 

For the past 16 months, I have been researching ways to optimise the shit out of Twitter campaigns so that I only pay a fraction of what Twitter recommends so that I can make my small budget stretch a whole lot further. 

I recently ran a campaign for @FoxAfrica where I managed to get 2 896 followers with only R 1,893.97. This is 99.96% cheaper than what Twitter suggested. That is crazy right? Well, if you follow the steps that I am about to present to you, you will also be able to make your small paid social budget stretch a whole lot further.

 Are you ready? Well then let's get started. 

 Step 1: Open Up Twitter Ads

To access Twitter Ads, you will need to visit www.ads.twitter.com. Once you land on this page you will see a dashboard that will give you an overview of all of your campaigns during a specific time period. It is extremely important to keep an eye on this, but we will get back to that in Step 13.

Step 2: Select Create Campaign

On the top right hand side of the page you should see a button that says "Create campaign". You are going want to click that button because this is where the magic happens.

 Step 3: Choose Objective: Followers

After you click the button, you will be taken to a new page. On this page, you will be able to choose an objective for your campaign. Our objective is to increase our follower count so the option that you need to select is obviously, followers. You will find this on the left-hand side of the page, the 2nd option on the list. 

Step 4: Name Your Campaign

This is not an important part of setting up a campaign but if you name the campaign correctly it will be easier to find when you need to optimise and report on the campaign. 

The naming technique that I got taught works very well but you can come up with your own naming convention. This is how I name my campaigns:

Quarter - Campaign Name/Objective - Date

This system just works easy for me and it looks really neat. 

 Step 5: Choose your funding source

The next step that you will need to do is choose your funding source but if you are a small owner then you should only have one account so you don't need to worry too much about that. 

 Step 6: Choose your dates

 Ok, now we are getting into the business side of things. The next task that you need to do is choose a date range for your campaign to run. Twitter recommends that you run the campaign over 1 day but experience tells me that if you run a follower campaign over 2-3 days, your CPF (cost per a follower) will be lower.

It is important that your campaign ends at 23:59 on the final day of the campaign. The reason for this is that there are a lot of users online in the evenings and this is a great time to get followers. 

 Step 7: Select Your Audience

It is now time to start choosing the audience that you will want to target. In step 7 you will broadly define your target audience by demographic targeting options. These are Country, Gender, Age and Language.

Unfortunately, in South Africa you cannot target specific provinces or regions like the U.K and American advertisers can. Once you have chosen the countries you want to attract followers from then you can choose gender and the age range that you want your audiences to be delivered to. Again, this is up to your own discretion, you have got to closely match these options to people who are going to be interested in your product. If your messages are in English I would only select the English language. 

Another cool feature in this step is that you can target audiences based on the device that they are using. This comes in really handy when you are promoting an app. You can then deliver custom messages to people across the various different operating systems. 

Step 8: Select additional audience features

This is where you need to be spending most of your time, the more time and the more research that you put into this section, the better your campaign will perform. Because this is the most complex section, I am going to break it down into each targeting option. 

8.1) Add followers

 By targeting usernames you will reach users with similar interests to the followers of any of those accounts. For example, if you target @SupersportTV you will reach people who are interested in sport.

In this section, I would target 40 - 50 usernames. Yes, I know it is tedious but remember. The more effort that you put into this, the better your campaign will perform. Over here you need to target your competitors. So for example, if you are a small coffee shop, you will want to target companies like Mugg and Bean and Wimpy. It is also a good idea to think about what accounts your target audience would be following. If you are an online beauty retailer then you should target beauty brands like Mac and Revlon as well as Cosmopolitan magazine and Makeup Daily. You also need to think about the celebrities your audience will follow, so if you are selling cricket equipment then you need to be targeting our nation's cricket heros like AB de Villiers and Faf Du Plessis. 

Here is a small sample of accounts a high-end fashion retailer should target.

Allow your imagination to run wild and if you ever get stuck, head over to Twitter and search popular hashtags around your brand. See which big accounts are tweeting about those topics and target their followers. 

After you are done adding your usernames, you will need to click on the bottom bar that says "expand your reach".

By clicking on this bar, Twitter will give you suggestions on similar accounts that you should target.

8.2) Add interests

Now interests are a whole lot simpler to target as all you have to do is check a box but it is of equal importance. Instead of searching for interests, click the button to the left that says "Browse Interests".

The key here is not only to choose the obvious interests that your desired target audience will have but you also need to think out the box here. For example, If you are advertising a gym, not only should you choose people interested in beauty and health but you should also choose people who are "interested" in baby and toddlers. Why? Well after a lady gets pregnant, she usually wants to get back the body she had before the baby, right? So yes, the more out the box you think, you will reach even more of your target audience. 

Over here, I would choose between 30 - 50 interests. If you pick any more than 50, Twitter will then ask you to remove some interests because your audience is too broad. 

Step 9: Set your budget

Now it's time to set your budget. Usually what I do is I spread the budget equally over the 2/3 days. So take your budget and divide it by the number of days that you will be running your campaign and that will be your daily budget. Make sure that your figures are correct before moving on to the next step. 

As you alter your daily budget, you will see the graph on the right of the page change. Please do not pay attention to this graph. It is all a lie!! If you follow the 13 steps that I have taken you through in this article, you will surpass these numbers in the first few hours.

Step 10: Click Advanced Options

Now this is where Twitter are trying to trick us, you will see it says 'Show advanced options". Instead of scrolling past that, I need you to click on that button and make some changes. 

You will now have 2 options. You can either choose Automatic Bid or you can choose Target cost. You will now need to do 2 things. 

1) Make your target cost between R0.80c - R1.

2) Ignore what other advertisers are bidding.

That number that Twitter tells you that they are bidding is highly exaggerated and to be honest it does not mean anything. Trust me on this one, you will be thanking me later. 

Step 11: Create compelling creatives

The next step is to create your sponsored tweets that will be displayed on Twitter. Twitter suggests that you need to create between 4-6 tweets. The reason for this is that they test the different tweets and whichever ones get the most engagement, those are the ones that deliver more impressions. 

These tweets need to be compelling. You need to tell people why they need to be following you. Make sure that in the message you use the words 'follow us for". Make sure that you show off your brand personality in the tweets. Most importantly, make sure that the tweets are relevant to your audience. Below are examples of tweets that I used for @FoxAfrica. 

Even though I did not tell them why they should follow us, the tweets worked really well for the following reasons.

 1. The tweets were targeted to the fans of the various shows

2. The tweets made them laugh

3. I told them to follow us

4. I created an emotional connection. 

Step 12: Review your campaign

Before you hit that Launch Button, I just need you to double check a few things so that your campaign runs smoothly. Check that the dates are right, check that your daily and lifetime budget is correct and make sure that all of your tweets have been added to the campaign. 

Step 13: Optimise 

The important part is to make sure that you always keep an eye on your campaign. Check up on the campaigns every 3 hours and just make sure that they are delivering impressions. If you see that the campaign is not delivering any impressions, try to raise your target cost by R0,10c- R0,15c. 

Well, there you have it. If you follow these steps then I am positive that you will get a whole bunch of followers for a whole lot cheaper than Twitter suggested. If you are having any problems with your campaigns then please feel free to send me an email ([email protected]) and I will definitely help you out. 

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Thanks Leighton

www.ardentaboutmarketing.com