The Complete Guide to Twitter Advertising for the Holidays

There’s no place like Twitter for the holidays. It’s where consumers go to research purchase decisions, talk about their shopping experiences, and interact with brands. As Twitter reported, there were more than 80 million tweets about holidays from July 2016 to January 2017, and holiday campaigns on the platform generate $6.67 per $1 spent by advertisers.

Twitter users also start their holiday shopping early. According to the social network, 84% of users plan to look for deals, reviews, and gift ideas. And 40% start their holiday shopping before Halloween.

That’s why it’s important to advertisers to start launching holiday campaigns now. With Twitter’s ad formats, tools, targeting capabilities, and analytics, this process doesn’t have to be so overwhelming. In fact, Twitter can be a cornerstone of your holiday marketing and sales engine.

Ready to start engaging your consumers on Twitter? Here’s what you need to know to boost your advertising strategy for the holidays, one tweet at a time.

10 Types of Ads for Your Holiday Twitter Campaign

Twitter offers a wide variety of ad types to help you engage audiences during the holidays. Let’s look at some of the options:

• Promoted Tweet: An targeted ad made from a new or existing Tweet.

For example, Kohl’s took the opportunity to promote tweets about Cyber Week deals, like this one:

New Cyber Deal: 12-piece cookware set from Food Network! http://t.co/6NyZJH14Yz pic.twitter.com/QbITPORmzD

— Kohl's (@Kohls) December 6, 2014

With Twitter’s new Promote Mode tool, you can also automatically promote Tweets that are likely to drive the most engagement.

• First View: An ad that gets placed at the top of people’s timelines for 24 hour, helping you generate mass awareness for a product or campaign launch.
• In-Stream Video Ads: Video ads that show up right in the middle of people’s feeds, providing a native and intuitive experience. Popular in-stream video formats include boomerangs, tutorials, stop-motion videos, and narrative videos.
• Promoted Video: A video ad built from an organic video you’ve already published to your account.

Best Buy incorporated video into its holiday 2014 #HintingSeason campaign, which encouraged followers to use the hashtag and tweet about what they wanted for the holidays.

We made @BethanyCulp’s #HintingSeason wishes come true by delivering new headphones to the Music City.https://t.co/b9hfXRpNIX

— Best Buy (@BestBuy) November 25, 2014

Best Buy then granted the wishes of six lucky tweeters and even filmed three of the special deliveries. The company also tapped Vine stars like Manon Mathews and the Eh Bee Family to create funny videos for the campaign.

• Video Website Cards: Video ads with an additional call to action that invites people to convert.
• Conversational Video Ads: A video ad that invites people to join the conversation, such as by tweeting a hashtag or answering a question.
• Promoted Tweet Carousel: An ad that includes a series of images or videos.
• Promoted Moments: An ad for a trending conversation that sits among Twitter’s curated Moments feed.
• Video App Card: A video promoting your app, including a call to action that invites people to install it.
• Website Card: An image ad with a call to action.

MVMT Watches launched Website Cards during the competitive holiday season to boost sales among Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers.

MVMT 15% Off Black Friday Sale! Save on our Entire Collection for a Limited Time. https://t.co/HdLRLi8qwk

— MVMT (@mvmt) November 26, 2015

Generating Leads from Your Holiday Twitter Campaign

With a strong lead generation strategy, you can drive customers to make purchases and establish the ROI of your Twitter ads. This is especially crucial during the holidays, when marketing competition is fierce. To that end, Twitter provides tools, metrics, and analytics to help you make the most of your ad campaigns.

Targeting Tools

Through Twitter’s ad platform, marketers can target their audiences by gender, language, device, service carrier, keywords, interests, behaviors, and users similar to their followers. They can also create tailored audiences of people from their own email lists and databases.

Advertisers can even target by events through Twitter’s events calendar. Maybe there’s a big holiday show coming up that you know your customers will watch. You can create targeted, timely ads to reach them as they tweet during the event.

Valuable Metrics

Once you have your campaigns set up, you can measure their success through Twitter’s analytics dashboard. Based on the type of ads you’re running, you’ll be able to measure a combination of link clicks, influencers, installs, retweets, engagements, and impressions. You can also segment your results by targeting criteria to see which demographics responded best to your messaging. With these metrics on-hand, you’ll be ready to optimize your campaigns for peak performance and reach customers in the most effective ways.

Quick Tips for Holiday Advertising on Twitter

Combine with TV Ad Spend

Social ad spend is expected to overtake TV ad spend by 2020. But for now, brands can drive multi-platform engagement by combining tv ad spend with social ad spend – especially on Twitter where users tune in during their favorite shows and live-tweet.

According to Nielsen, audiences are more likely to watch TV programming after being exposed to Twitter advertising. And when Twitter ads complement TV ads, users demonstrate higher engagement (+31%) and memorability (+35%) than when they’re only watching the event on TV. For example, BET saw a 2X increase in tune-in lift by combining Twitter and TV campaigns for the Hip Hop Awards.

Talk to Consumers Directly

By being open to your customers’ interests, concerns, and needs, you show that you hear them and that you’re committed to helping. As Twitter found, 77% of customers who receive friendly or personalized brand interactions on the platform are likely to recommend that brand to their friends.

Does a Twitter user have a question about a certain sale? Monitor their tweet and respond in real-time. Did someone offer a positive review of your product? Give them a shoutout or a special offer. Is a customer having an issue with one of your services? Reach out to help with the DM Prompt feature. These strategies can go a long way in differentiating your brand from competitors.

Four Tweeting Birds… and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

You already know where your consumers are going to share their shopping experiences and make purchase decisions. All you have to do is be there when they scroll through their feeds.

Whether you’re looking to engage last-minute shoppers, boost a big holiday sale, or meet your Q4 quota, it’s never too late to launch new holiday campaigns on Twitter. And with First View and In-Stream Video Ads, sharing the perfect message with the right people doesn’t get much easier – especially during crunch time.