First, lets discuss the four main options available in terms of targeting on the platform, namely:

• Interests & Followers: Reach people with specific interests or who are similar to followers of specific accounts
• Keywords: Reach people that search, tweet about, or engage with specific keywords
• Television: Reach people who engage with specific television programming
• Tailored Audiences: Reach people using your own data

The interests & followers area is similar to Facebook’s ‘precise interest’ targeting that has proven so powerful when used correctly.  However, one key difference is that the targeting works based on similar followers, with Twitter explaining it like this. “Targeting @usernames allows you to reach users with interests similar to followers of any of those accounts”.  This brings a slight element of vagueness.  On Facebook, for example, I can choose to target all of my competitors fans, whereas on Twitter I can only target a more vague concept of people with similar interests to people who follow my competitors.  This will give a bigger reach, the only issue is we aren’t told what Twitter class as people with similar interests and therefore this all feels slightly outside of our control.  In an age of exact targeting, advertisers demand to know exactly what is happening with their ads, and this concept may not be warmly received by many.

One area where Twitter has huge potential is in the Keyword targeting. Targeting by conversation content is a concept that no other mainstream platform has yet rolled out, and if used correctly has huge power.  There are a lot of good options in Twitter’s platform around this, with great features such as:

• Negative sentiment filtering
• Keyword volume estimates
• Bulk keyword import
• Keyword match types

The only thing missing, in my opinion, from the keyword targeting section is the ability to choose timeframes.  I would assume Twitter prioritise the serving of ads to people who have mentioned your targeted keywords most recently, but it’d be great to able to specify this.  For example being able to target people who have discussed the phrase “Buy a Macbook” is powerful, but being able to just target those who have discussed it within the last 24 hours is even better.

The Television targeting segment is clever, and plays into Twitter’s strength as the leader in second screen conversation.  Targeting conversation around a TV show before, during and after the show is a great option if you have the right kind of brand or appropriate content to be relevant within that conversation.

Tailored audiences hold great potential on Twitter.  Targeting using tailored audiences is the equivalent of using custom audiences on Facebook.  Whilst Facebook are making custom audiences more and more accessible with launches such as custom audiences from website visitors recently, Twitter’s tailored audiences are only available through third-party providers at present.  That being said, if you can get access then including your current customers in your targeting set makes complete sense.

What would be great to see from the next iteration in Twitter’s advertising platform would be the ability to use all of these three options in conjunction with each other to make the targeting more and more advanced.  For example, being able to target users who follow a certain celebrity or brand and have discussed a relevant product is better than either part in singularity.  A real life example of this could be attempting to target marketing professionals interested in Twitter advertising.  Targeting people who follow Social Media Explorer and other relevant industry blogs who have mentioned ‘Twitter Advertising’ is better than just targeting people interested in Social Media Explorer (as some may be un-engaged followers, or just interested in Facebook for instance), and people who talk about ‘Twitter Advertising’ alone may be general users discussing the ads they are seeing, not necessarily in a negative frame.  Put the two targeting elements together and you have a much more focused targeting set.  I personally use this kind of combined targeting on other platforms and it drives the best success rates and lowest CPA’s so we can’t wait to see this reach the Twitter platform.

In conclusion, the platform is a great first step for Twitter and is far better than Facebook’s initial self-serve platform.  However, there is work to be done and areas where improvements could be made for the benefit of all advertisers.  We’d love to hear what kind of targeting variants are proving most successful for you in the comments so please share!

The post Everything You Need To Know About Twitter’s Advertising Options appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

With this in mind, the need to get ahead of your competitors and leverage every impression your content receives is key.  To do this, we recommend analyzing your competitors’ efforts and comparing key performance metrics to your own.  By understanding their performance in detail, you can optimize your plans for success.

The first step is to decide who you’re classing as your competitors – this may not be as obvious as you think.  With social media platforms, your competitors should be classed as any of the following (with the more you can track the better):

• Your direct, traditional competitors
• Those competing for the attention of a similar audience to you, even if in a different sector
• Businesses with a similar content strategy, albeit for a different audience

Valuable insights can be gained from all three categories, although naturally you want to beat your traditional competitors the most!  Those that are competing for the attention of the same audience as you are also very important, so ensure you track at least one of these.

Once you’re happy with your competitor set, it’s time to start pulling out some data.  The key data we’re after here varies by channel, with Facebook & Twitter currently holding the best competitive data.

Facebook Data

On Facebook the first metric to track is the ultimate vanity metric, but tracking the size of your Facebook page over time versus competitors allows you to see growth rates.  This may be influenced by advertising and offline campaigns, but is worth monitoring as a judge of overall performance.  You can measure your page size growth easily in Facebook Insights, but to measure others comparatively you will need to use a paid analytics tool.

Beyond page size, the data available on Facebook on competitors starts to become more interesting.  The key metrics to analyze in terms of your competitors is engagement rate, broken down by a variety of factors.  For instance, comparing engagement rates by days, time of post, by content type and content topic allows you to really start learning.  Some of this data can be pulled from Facebook Insights, whereas some needs to come from paid analytics tools.

There are a number of paid tools available on top of Facebook Insights to help you extract all of the data you need.  I personally use tools like Socialbakers, & Optimal Social, as well as proprietary data mining tools to get this data out in an efficient way.

Examples of the kinds of data you can see, and how to present it to gain the best insight are below:

As you can see from these graphs, comparing the volume of posts on a topic and the average engagement of these posts gives you an indication of strong and poor performance.  By doing this for your page and your competitors pages you can get strong indications of where to amend your content in the future.

Twitter Data

On Twitter, you need to keep a track of your competitors overall following, their daily mentions, and their Tweet engagement rate.  Twitter’s analytics platform is still fairly new, and doesn’t give much to compare to competitors as of yet, but there are plenty of free and paid Twitter tools to help you out, such as Topsy, Twitonomy, and Twitalyzer.

Tracking daily mentions, following and average engagement rate at a top line level allows you to analyze on which days you are performing better or worse than your competitors.  This allows you to step back and see what content was posted on those days by you and your competitors, to see how you did well, or where you can improve based on what your competitors activity was.

The same can be said for any other social media platform where any public data is available.  Generally speaking the other social media platforms are not as developed analytically, but if you are prepared to put in a little manual effort to calculate your engagement rates and that of competitors then you can follow the above techniques to compare engagement rates by various factors across different companies.

We’re not suggesting copying your competitors, but simply learning from their activity, as well as your own.  The performance of their content across social media channels is an indication of how similar content may perform for you.  You may see certain elements in their strategy or specific content elements that you can use to your advantage straight away, or over the longer term by tweaking your content strategy.

Make sure you are constantly optimizing your content posting strategy by looking at your data and comparing it to competitors.  Learn from their mistakes, as well as their successes and gain a true understanding of your performance to allow you to constantly improve over time.

The post How To Analyze Your Competitors Using Social Data appeared first on Social Media Explorer.