How I Used Social Harvest to Build a Top Performing Twitter Ad Campaign
The Social Media Tool That Helped Itself Grow
Even before Social Harvest® is complete, its value shines through and helps it promote itself across Twitter with an impressive engagement rate.
What is Social Harvest? It’s an open-source, fully featured, social media analytics platform (free to use). It literally will change the social media analytics landscape. Not just because it will make analytics accessible to more people, but also because it lifts the veil of mystery on social media analytics.
Of course any new tool must prove itself and even before completion it certainly has. Twitter e-mailed me a congratulatory letter saying how Social Harvest’s ad campaign was in the top 30% of all ad campaigns running on Twitter (and the engagement rate has only gone up since)!
@socialharvest has been seeing steady growth in followers in part due to this successful engagement across its ad campaigns. Newsletter sign-ups (the primary campaign) are strong as well.
The Target
While not reaching millions of people, the campaign is very focused and as a result the engagement rates are good for Twitter (avg. 2.8%). Who’s being targeted? Marketers, startups, and entrepreneurs mainly. The campaigns don’t stray very far outside the target audience and that’s because keywords are used when possible. Interest based ads on Twitter proved to capture a wider audience in the millions — and engagement rates were good there too, but it was an audience that didn’t quite fit. I didn’t care for some of the followers (some were even bot accounts that, yes, I had to pay for).
Rather than using a broad interest based ad campaign on Twitter, try a more focused campaign using specific keywords.
The Method
So how does one choose good keywords? Twitter doesn’t (yet) have tools as advanced as Google for this, but it does indicate expected reach for keywords. That’s fine, but we can do better.
Using Social Harvest, I setup a “territory” (fancy word for group of data harvested using a set of criteria or keywords) for “social media.” The results returned by Social Harvest uncovered many useful keywords and hashtags. Social Harvest’s API (even before I visualized the data) shed light on the most popular keywords.
Keep in mind data was harvested from several social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and more. This helped create a broader picture with a little more balance (though I could and did narrow down by network to see hashtags from Twitter specifically in some cases).
One of the most important things in social media is to use more than one network.
So I knew people were going to see my ads for the given keywords. In fact, with a little digging through Social Harvest’s results, I knew which people were likely seeing the ads too. This is because Twitter serves ads to people both searching for and using (retweeting, etc.) the keywords.
Since Social Harvest also gathers statistics on gender, I could determine about how many males/females would be seeing my ads — statistically speaking. Now we’re talking!
Of course, I don’t care about gender in my case, but other advertisers may.
Additionally, as anyone would do, I chose a few obvious keywords to try. Or, at least, what I thought were obvious. Perhaps these keywords were so common that my bids weren’t high enough but, really, I just believe they weren’t focused enough for good engagement (because I adjusted my bids beyond the suggestions). The trick with advertising is to optimize on keywords that perform well, but are not quite as common, as to lower your ad spend for a better ROI because there’s less “competition” for these keywords. They’re glorious hidden gems for advertisers.
So how did those top keywords perform compared to the obvious keywords and even those suggested by Twitter? Quite well. “SMM” was not in my original set, but I added it later based on Social Harvest’s results. It proved to provide an engagement rate of over 8% whereas the more obvious “marketing” or “social media” keywords only saw about 1.75% — 3.25% engagement (just about average according to Twitter).
Part of this could be, perhaps, because “SMM” is more accurate than just “marketing” or “social media” — but I didn’t think about it at first and there was no suggestion from Twitter. No other tools either. This is how hidden gems are discovered. Social Harvest turned me on to this without me having to scour Twitter and manually record my observations in some spreadsheet. Talk about a time saver!
The Second Method
So getting a list of the most used keywords is pretty clever, but there’s a second method that I like even better for super targeted advertising. It also happens to be far more effective in terms of engagement and ROI.
Time sensitive keywords are those used by certain events and even other marketing campaigns.
Make your friends and competitors work for you.
One way of getting these keywords is to be aware of what your competition and friends are sharing. Both can help you. For example, my friend, Twitter e-mailed me information for advertising tips and with that came the hashtag “MktgKickstart.” This keyword didn’t reach many people at all, but the engagement rate was very high at over 14%. “TwitterAdsChat” was another one with over 15% engagement.
Obviously Social Harvest isn’t looking at your inbox, but it is looking at conversations across social media. It will uncover these time sensitive keywords. However, because they are only used for a brief period of time you likely won’t see them at the top of a most used list that covers a large period of time.
Social Harvest lets you filter results by date range so you could look for the popular keywords each day (or even narrower). It also shows you a list of messages, so you can easily glance at a filtered set of results. This makes it very easy spot time sensitive keywords, though you need to jump on them fast of course.
Using this method has led to some great engagement rates for Social Harvest and the cost is low because not many people are on top of the ball. That’s difficult without a tool like Social Harvest because it’s a labor intensive process.
Going Farther
How can we push it farther? Well, Twitter does have an Ads API that it’s testing. Perhaps we could alter campaigns in real-time based on trends and other discoveries by Social Harvest? If Twitter allows the editing of campaigns via its API, then you bet we can!
Keywords could also be used within the ad messages. They aren’t just good for targeting an audience, they also have value in sending a message which resonates with your audience. Social Harvest could easily let you jump into the conversation at key points and help optimize your promoted Tweets.
Social Harvest provides you with a ton of incredibly powerful information that can help you with more than just ad campaigns.
Did I mention Social Harvest is open-source? Written in Google’s Go, it is ready to be expanded and easy to work on. The sky is the limit!
Check out Social Harvest’s site and sign up for the newsletter that will notify you of progress and follow on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook for updates and tips.
