Is Twitter Social or Search?

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There is no doubt that Twitter is popular. But the platform’s advanced search options are an underrated hero for brands looking to join conversations, generate leads, calculate sentiment or keep tabs on the competition

Twitter has 8.85 per cent of the world’s overall social media user base so the fact that your consumers are tweet-happy is a no-brainer. The biggest strategy for brands is to find the overlap between users and consumers and tap into the conversations. Of course, it’s not so much about making a sale. It’s about sharing a laugh or a cause that contributes significantly towards brand building. According to a 2019 Magna & Twitter study, when considering price and quality, brand features, and cultural involvement, 25 per cent of a consumer’s purchase decision is determined by a brand’s involvement in culture.

According to data from the last quarter of 2021, Twitter’s worldwide monetisable Daily Active Users (mDAU) stood at 217 million. In the US, country of origin, 46 per cent of Twitter users reported using Twitter daily. Excluding the US, Twitter has 169 million monetisable daily active users. In Asia, Japan and India lead the way with the largest number of Twitter users. Combined, the figures stand higher than the US audience. Six more countries boast a user base of 10 million each, including the United Kingdom, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. 

With all the conversation about how Twitter’s free speech and board decisions are bound to be impacted, one thing that promises to stay the same is Twitter for Business which offers marketers clear markers for whom to target, measure how your campaign works and be a part of a meaningful conversation.  

Twitter knows how to form communities. Marketers can leverage all that organic activity to join the conversation via the platform’s conversation targeting capabilities. Twitter Ads offers marketers a syntax sheet to simplify which audience you need to target with a choice of 10,000 conversation topics across 25 categories, including sports, lifestyle, video games, books and more.

When you hover over a conversation topic in your campaign setup, you’ll see a box with the following information:

1. Name of conversation topic audience
2. Description of users in the audience
3. Estimated audience size

People may be considered part of a conversation audience if they’ve Tweeted or engaged with a Tweet mentioning the topic or dwelled on a Tweet about the conversation topic. 

Last year, Etihad Airways announced a special offer for all the fans watching the Euro 2020 final. Fans were automatically entered into the competition when they tweeted using the #EtihadFreeFlights. For this campaign, the company used Twitter’s interest targeting and conversation targeting options to reach people already engaging with football and travel topics. It further used Tweet engager retargeting to reach people who engaged with their previous pre-match Tweets.

The campaign included a mix of ad formats; image and video ads with the addition of a conversation button in some.

When Saudi Arabia-based TamkeenHR wanted to raise awareness and reach a high volume of people to promote their services and generate more leads in 2021, it tested three different campaigns at once — an engagement campaign, a reach campaign and an app installs campaign. Twitter Analytics proved that the engagement campaign was the most effective, and it was able to filter down the large audience to a more qualified one. Through follower look-alikes, it was able to maximise highly engaged users. Follower look-alikes targeting allows you to target people with interests similar to an account’s followers. While keywords helped its marketing team rein in the conversation without dilution. TamkeenHR’s Twitter Ad’s achieved 30.7M impressions in two weeks. 

Keywords come with include and exclude features on Twitter for Business

1. Add: If someone has either Tweeted or interacted with a Tweet containing the keyword, and they meet your geo, language, device, and gender targeting, they’re eligible to be targeted by this campaign.
2. Exclude: If someone has either Tweeted or interacted with a Tweet containing the excluded keyword, they are not eligible to be targeted by this campaign, even if they meet your geo, language, device, and gender targeting. Additionally, your campaign will not serve in the Search results for any excluded keywords.