Twitter ads have been getting a lot of traction recently, and similar to other social advertising platforms, they’ve been changing the landscape of paid search. Many companies are finding that Twitter is a great place to promote their brand, their message, and gain a larger reach on the web, however, with all the new types of ads coming out these days, we wanted to give you an overview of the three main types of ads and some quick tips on how to use them.

Promoted Tweets: this is the most common and easiest type of campaign to run on Twitter.  Simply select the tweets you want to promote, set your target audience, budget, and go!  You can select users similar to your followers, followers of similar or competitor brands, and even target by category and interest.  In addition, you can opt to have a promoted tweet only published to your target audience and not appear on your timeline if it’s a specific promotion to gain new followers, for example.

Quick tip: promote tweets with images or links for better engagement. Not sure what    to promote? Use Twitter’s “Automatic Top 5” option that will automatically select and promote your top 5 most engaging tweets to your targeted audience.

Promoted Account: this is a very simple way to promote your brand on Twitter to gain more followers.  You can target users the same way as promoted tweets and set your daily and total budget caps to ensure you stay within your spend limits.  Rather than promote individual tweets, this lists your account as a promoted account on the left of a user’s twitter feed, suggesting they follow you.  Promoted account campaigns are slightly more expensive per engagement than other ad types since the main purpose here is to build your followers list (as opposed to gaining clicks and retweets, which are one-time interactions)

Quick tip: target your top competitors coupled with key categories and interests to gain followers and grow your audience. Remember to keep your tweet feed engaging otherwise all those new followers you gain may end up un-following you!

Promoted trends: this is a way to promote keywords via hashtags on Twitter.  When you are trying to build awareness of news, a special event, or anything else that can be followed via a hashtag, this is the best Twitter promotion for you.  Keep in mind that for this to really take off, you want to create a hashtag that others will want to use in their tweets, so keep it relevant to your company and whatever you are trying to promote while also making sure it has the potential to become interactive and go viral.

Quick tip: promoted hashtags work great for special events and contests where you want people to share their input, pictures and more. Encourage them to tweet back at your brand using your promoted hashtag for even more traction.

In addition to these types of ads and promotions, Twitter also offers Twitter Cards, which is a more complicated option for developers.  Twitter cards work based off HTML code snippets on your site, and while they can be very engaging, they are also much harder to set up.  For most marketing efforts, we recommend choosing from the three options above.  They are all easy campaigns to set up and manage, and offer a wide variety of targeting and budgeting options to ensure that you can reach your potential audience without breaking the bank.