Twitter is a massive social media platform which MSPs can use to generate new leads for their business. Twitter was initially designed with conversations in mind so it is more limited in terms of long-winded messages that can be sent. Only recently have they increased the character limit on tweets from the original 140 to 280. Even with the increase of characters, it is generally better to keep it short and sweet and to the point. Remember to always keep your brand message in mind when tweeting, keep your content in theme with your business’ industry and not to engage in conversations that wouldn’t benefit the company, but also don’t be afraid to defend the company in a civil manner like the example below.

With roughly 330 million monthly active users there is a high chance that your customers are using the platform. The age range using Twitter is quite varied, according to the Pew Research Center 36% of 18-29-year olds are using Twitter and 22% of 30-49-year olds and 18% of 50-64-year olds. Just like Facebook and LinkedIn Twitter needs to make revenue and this is done through companies advertising on their platforms and Twitter users using Twitter ads to increase their reach and generate more revenue for themselves. Over the years Twitter has expanded it’s ad offerings to have a variety of different content types to make sure you can engage with your audience the best you can.

The Twitter Ads platform is designed quite similar to the Facebook Ads Manager. The image above shows what you will see once you have created a Twitter Ads account and you click to start to create a campaign. Here you decide what your objective will be so what is the main metric that you want to see high numbers in. If you just want to increase awareness you will look to reach and impressions and if you want people liking and sharing your content then you will choose engagement as your primary objective. For this example, we will pick gaining new followers as the primary objective of this example campaign.

Once your objective has been set you will be presented with the screen above. On the right hand of the screen, you will see more of an explanation of the campaign you have decided to go with. In the RED box you will decide the name of your campaigns so if you have a number of campaigns then you can easily tell which is which. Next in the PURPLE box is a very important step and that is setting up your budget for the campaign. This can either be set at a daily limit or you can set overall how much you are willing to spend if you are more restricted. The BLUE box is a continuation on the budgeting section where if you want to set an end date for your campaign if it is based around an event or if you simply only want to run it for a certain period of time. Alternatively, you can leave it to run continuously until the budget for the campaign runs out.

In the image below you will see the next screen in the process of creating a Twitter ad campaign. Here you decide the creatives for your campaign. If you are regularly active on Twitter then you will have the option of using posts that you have already created for your feed however if you aren’t posting regularly it is recommended to create new and fresh posts that will better showcase your brand message and the idea behind your campaign.

Next, you have to define the audience that you want these posts to target and this is very similar to the Facebook Ads Manager platform. With the different levels of targeting Twitter will try to give you an estimated audience that you will hit. You can base your target audiences on gender, location and age ranges. You can also include or exclude certain aspects of the audience such as pages that they follow and their hobbies allowing you to really narrow down to the exact customer you wanted to engage with. You can also choose to not have current followers on your Twitter page be able to see the ads so you can save on budget if you want to target completely new leads. You will also be able to save your audiences for later so you can create campaigns faster and have them be as well designed as ones that you will initially spend a lot of time on.

Online blog Statusbrew has gathered statistics in relation to using Twitter for business in 2018. It found that 65.8% of businesses in the US with 100+ employees are using Twitter for content marketing. 78% of people who complain to a business on Twitter expect a response within the hour. In recent years Twitter has become a customer service/support tool for many businesses as some people prefer the anonymity using the platform as opposed to calling someone. In relation to that statistic, it also found that 77% of Twitter users feel more positive about a brand if their tweet has been replied to. Twitter allows you to give high quality customer support without being stuck to a phone all day and to give your content marketing an extra channel to further its reach.