Looking to improve your Twitter marketing efforts in 2021?

While other platforms offer greater reach, Twitter remains a key part of the modern communications landscape, and can be a great platform for connecting with the right audience in order to showcase your brand and products. 

If you can get it right.

The concise nature of effective tweet composition does take time to master, and it’s never easy to come up with the right sentence or two which will entice people to click as they scroll through their feed.

But if you are looking to improve your Twitter ad efforts, specifically, Twitter’s team of internal ad specialists recently provided some helpful tips to consider in your Twitter ad creation process.

Twitter’s first key tip is to adhere to its ‘three R’s’ methodology for a strong campaign approach:

Twitter seems to be keen on rules of three at the moment – last week, it shared its ‘Three C’s’ (Concise, Clear, Conversational) approach for better branding. 

The Three R’s are more specifically aligned with paid promotion, and they’re really, fairly obvious provisos for an effective ad. But they do provide some guidance that’s easy to keep in mind – are you generating response, is the content clearly relevant to your target market, and are you keeping your messaging fresh and engaging?

They’re broad parameters, but Twitter has also provided more specific insights on each to further hone in your approach.  

Aligning with the Three R’s, Twitter’s ad specialists highlight the importance of effective creative elements.

“Campaigns that have strong, eye-catching creative with a clear call to action typically perform much better than those without.”

I mean, yeah, if you can come up with a great visual element, then that’s going to get attention. That, of course, doesn’t make it any easier to actually compose one, but the point here is that it’s worth taking the time to come up with more striking visuals for your campaigns, which, with the array of creative tools and apps now on offer, is possible, even for novice creators.

For example, apps like Motionleap enable you to easily add digital animation and effects to your images.

Most of these apps are designed for Stories, but they can also be used to create images and clips that you can export for use in any of your campaigns or processes. 

And there are a lot of them – look up the top apps in the ‘Photo and Video’ category in The App Store and you’ll find a range of editing apps that you can try out for your visual elements.

Visuals also play an important role in the ‘Recency’ element of the Three R’s approach, with Twitter’s ad specialists noting that you should look to refresh your visuals often to maximize engagement.

“Using 3-5 creatives with bright colors, show-stopping images and interesting motion captures viewers’ attention, and increases the chance of a successful serve.”

So, again, focusing on your visuals is key, and tools like Motionleap can help you add that extra flair, even if you’re not a graphic design expert.

Twitter’s ad team also suggests trying out different CTAs in your Twitter ads to measure response.

“Test more aggressive CTAs (e.g. ‘Get a Quote’, ‘Book Tickets’ or ‘Shop our Sale’) against softer ones (e.g. ‘Learn More’)”

Of course, testing should always be part of your process, in every element. It just comes down to how much time you have, and how much money you’re able to spend on different test campaigns. But it could well be worth the investment – finding the right CTA can have a significant impact on ad performance, which could boost your ROI.

And finally, Twitter’s ad experts recommend keeping your tweet copy ‘short and to the point’.

“The perfect complement to an engaging creative is a concise tweet (<100 characters).”

You want to be guiding your ad viewers towards your CTA, so you don’t want your copy to distract from that.

Twitter has advised similar on the use of hashtags – while hashtags can help you tap into trending discussions, they can also distract from your messaging, giving your audience something else to click on within your tweet, when you really only want them to click on your CTA.

Keeping it short and to the point, without distractions, could help improve your overall results. 

These are some good, general tips for your Twitter ad copy, which may provide some guidance in your approach. If you’re looking to get into Twitter ads, or to improve your results, it’s worth considering these tips as you go through the creation process.