Social
media is one of the fastest growing industries in the marketing world.
As the top social networks grow and new social networks are created, new
and innovative advertising opportunities will present themselves.
Sitting at the top of a hill and screaming about your brand is no way
to approach social media, but when done right, paid media advertising
on social networks can help you amplify your social presence and build a
larger, stronger online community.
Overtime, Twitter has developed a unique advertising platform that
can be very useful to advertisers. The following outlines how Twitter
can help build your online community with engaged users, as well as
increase brand awareness and refine your content marketing strategy.
Why Use Paid Media To Back Your Social Program?
The Snowball Effect
There are some great companies out there with unique, engaging social
media strategies. But not every single one is going to turn into the
next great social marketing plan, generate 500,000 followers, and turn a
small company into the next Google.
The problem with many programs is their limited reach. It takes time
to build a quality community online. Utilizing Twitter’s advertising
program can provide a faster boost to your efforts and help you build a
stronger community.
Through Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets, you can reach more
users, expose them to your great content, and bring them into your
community. This will then lead to them sharing your content, and their
friends sharing your content, and their friend’s friends sharing your
content, and so on and so on…
Essentially, utilizing paid media can be the push that gets the snow
ball rolling. The community you build will not leave once you stop
advertising – it will continue to organically add members as long as you
keep engaging and giving the community what it wants.
Sometimes all your social campaigns needs is a little kick start. A properly executed campaign on Twitter Ads can do just that.
Content Adaptation
Part of your social strategy should include what type of content
you're creating and sharing. While you can learn over time what content
resonates with your audience, doing this same exercise through Twitter’s
paid media platform accelerates and provides you with more data points
to analyze and understand the content you should be producing and
publishing.
Through Twitter’s analytics, you can easily see which content was
shared most frequently, clicked on, and @replied to. The data will show
which pieces of content are connecting most with your audience and that
can help you redefine and adapt your content strategy to fit your
community’s wants and needs.
The Proof Is In The Numbers
The digital marketing agency I work for recently ran an extremely
successful Twitter advertising campaign for one of our clients, and was
featured in a
case study on Twitter’s website. Here are some of the results from the campaign along with insights.
Amplifying Awareness
Reaching new users and exposing them to the brand was an extremely
important goal for our client. Through paid media campaigns, we were
able to expose more than 280,000 individual Twitter users with our
messaging and content. These users exposed to the advertising fit the
key demographics and geographic areas the company operated. These were
valuable brand impressions that help promote the message of the
campaign.
Building the Community
After seeing stagnant growth in the size of their online community,
Twitter Promoted Account and Promoted Tweet campaigns were leveraged to
build the accounts follower base. These campaigns led to an exponential
rise in the size of the community. The graph below showcases the
exponential growth:

The growth of community has continued even after the paid media
program ended. As pointed out above, the "snowball effect" that was
kick-started by the paid media campaign started the growth, which was
then carried on through organic growth.
Increasing Engagement
Not only did the campaigns increase the size of the community, but
they attracted highly influential and active community members. Much of
the success of the campaign was due to the users who joined the
community during this campaign. The users brought into this community
were 45 percent more likely to retweet or @reply to the account’s tweet.

As the community grew with more engaged users, the number of users
who retweeted or @replied increased exponentially as well. This level of
interaction continued to stay at a high level once the campaign was
turned off. This is a great sign that the community built through paid
media was built with active, engaged, and interested Twitter users.
These active members of the community helped the account see their engagement rate triple and stay at that level post campaign.
Understanding Your Audience
One of the great benefits of the analytics package that comes with
Twitter advertising is the information available about your follower
base. Information regarding their interests, demographic information,
and more is available. This information can be used not only to fine
tune your advertising and Twitter campaigns but also can help you
understand what type of content needs to be produced on your blog or
shared on other social media sites.
When diving into the data for this specific campaign, we were able to
see our audience skewed towards females ages 25-34 who enjoyed physical
fitness, specifically yoga. This data point allowed us to not only
cater our messaging toward this demographic, but with new advertising
options available through Twitter, we could specifically target this
interest group with content.
By understanding who the audience was on this social platform, we
were able to work with our creative team to create content this specific
audience would engage with.
Recap
Overall, this Twitter advertising program enabled us to build out a
stronger community full of active, engaged users much more quickly than
we could have ever done organically. We were able to quickly understand
what content resonated with our audience and have continued to see
organic growth of the community while continuously seeing the engagement
rate level increase.