Two weeks ago I started running a small experiment on Twitter’s ad platform.

Why?

First, it’s no secret that Twitter traffic is the conversion king in social media. Reports show figures of up to 9 times more leads being generated from Twitter compared to Facebook and LinkedIn (B2B). Twitter traffic definitely converts.

Second, Twitter actually offers some advantages in terms of building a following compared to Facebook. Your Tweets are visible on the timelines of all of your followers whereas your Facebook posts will definitely not be shown to all of your fans.

Third, Twitter is a great way to do some market scoping. Twitter Advertising allows you to test what your audience responds to well.

Here are the overall results from my little Twitter advertising experiment:

• In total I spent a bit more than $100 over 9 days

• It bought me 110 followers, a few hundred visitors and about a dozen email opt-ins

• Towards the end, I had my cost per follower down to 47 cents

• I tripled my blog conversion rate by using Twitter ads as a research tool

Before I go into detail on the “how to”-part of the post, let’s first look at the two main Twitter ad formats.

Twitter Advertising Formats

There are currently two main advertising formats on Twitter: Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Tweets allow you to put specific Tweets in front of a large audience. You can either promote any of your existing Tweets or you can create new Tweets just for advertising purposes. These Tweets then will not show on your Twitter timeline.

Promoted Tweets are a good way to drive traffic to a blog post, landing page or product page. You can target your audience using keywords, interests or even by targeting the followers of another Twitter user.

With this ad format you pay for every engagement. So if people click your Twitter profile, retweet, reply to your Tweet, click on the link in the Tweet or start following you these are all engagements you pay for.

This makes it much harder to determine a cost per click from a Promoted Tweet. If you use this format, make sure to use dedicated tracking links for your ads so you can monitor how much traffic a Promoted Tweet actually drives to your website.

Twitter also has its own conversion tracking solution which you can integrate on your website. This is useful to determine the cost per opt-in or cost per sale from a Promoted Tweet.

Promoted Accounts

Promoted Account campaigns allow you to promote a Twitter account to gain more followers. The same targeting options apply as for Promoted Tweets.

With your Promoted Account campaign you can create a Tweet that you would like to show next to your Twitter account name.

You should use the 140 characters to tell your ideal audience why they should follow you. In this case you are not promoting a Tweet but your Twitter profile.

One key difference between the two ad formats is that in Promoted Account campaigns you only pay for new followers. If a user happens to click on your Twitter profile and clicks through to your website this is not charged for.

Also, you are not charged for clicks on any links that you include in your Promoted Account ads. However, including links in these kinds of ads will lower your follower rate.

You want to maximize your follower rate because your ads competes with other ads on the Twitter platform. If you follower rate is too low chances are that the ad will stop showing over time.

How I Tripled My Blog Conversion Rate Using Twitter Ads

I’ve only recently started writing more on this blog. So while the traffic has been increasing nicely, my conversion rate from visitors to email subscribers was only around 2%.

My goal was to increase the opt-in rate in order to turn some visitors into long-term readers of the blog.

Increasing the opt-in conversion rate by running an A/B split test on the website would have taken weeks with the current level of traffic.

I’m impatient. So I used a shortcut to speed up the testing.

I ran a Promoted Account campaign to test which wording would generate the highest follower rate among my target audience.

I created one campaign targeting Twitter usernames with large audiences in the marketing field and one campaign targeting interest categories like advertising, marketing and entrepreneurship.

In both campaigns I created 5 – 10 different Twitter ads.

I split tested these ads for a bit more than a week to see which one would kind of wording would maximize the follower rate.

At the end of the week I had determined the best performing wording which I’m now using as the headline of my opt-in form below and on the “subscribe”-page.

The result?

I more than tripled my opt-in conversion rate with this small test.

Doing the same with split testing would have taken at least a couple of weeks.

How To Buy Twitter Followers For Less Than 50 Cents

At the end of my Twitter experiment my cost per follower was less than 50 cents.

Here’s a quick step by step guide that you can use to generate the same kind of performance in your Twitter campaigns.

Step 1: Create a Promoted Account campaign

Create a new Promoted Account campaign and set your country targeting based on where your ideal audiences reside.

As a first start you should create about 3 – 4 completely different ads in the campaign. You want as much variety as possible at this point.

In terms of your user targeting I recommend targeting both Twitter usernames as well as interest categories. Make sure to create two separate campaigns for this so you can adjust your bids and daily budgets for each of them separately.

The easiest way to do this is by first creating one campaign targeting Twitter usernames.

Once you have finalized this campaign, you can go back to it and click “edit”. At the top right there will be an option to copy the campaign.

This will save you a lot of time since you will only have to change the name and the targeting settings of the duplicate campaign.

For the campaign targeting usernames you should compile a list of at least 20 Twitter usernames in your industry. Each of these Twitter users should have a large following (at least 10,000 followers each). Add all of these usernames to your targeting.

For your campaign targeting interests you can pick the best fit from the pre-defined Twitter categories.

Once you have finalized your campaigns you can launch away.

Step 2: Optimize Your Campaign

After one or two days your campaigns will have accumulated some data you can start optimizing them.

Here are a few ways to decrease your cost per follower:

Improve the wording of your Promoted Account ads

This is probably the best way to improve the performance.

Look at your different ad variations and only keep the one ad with the highest follower rate. Remove all of the other ads and then create 1-2 new ads. These new ads are designed to beat your control ad.

Keep repeating this process every couple of days and you ad performance will keep increasing.

Play with the maximum bids in your account

Twitter tends to suggest bids higher than $2. Once you have an ad that is converting well, you won’t have to bid that high anymore.

Keep lowering your bids until your campaign is barely spending its daily budget. That’s where you’ve found your optimum bid.

Refine your targeting settings

In the Twitter interface you can check which interest categories or username handles have generated the best performance.

Some of your selected interest categories might not be a good fit. This will show as a low engagement rate and usually a higher cost per follower. The same is true for your username targeting.

In both cases you should remove all of the low performing targeting settings.

Refine your device targeting

In your campaign statistics you can also check which devices have generated the best performance (Computers, iOS, Android, Blackberry).

In my case, iOS devices generated about 75% of all conversions! Depending on your audience this might be different for you.

To decrease you cost per follower just narrow down your targeting to the best performing devices.