Twitter is a very powerful social network for online advertising and marketing for your business — with an estimated online audience representing 15% of all adult internet users and 26% of the coveted 18-29 year old demographic, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. We recently shared some valuable Twitter tips for business on this blog.  This week, I want to talk about two popular Twitter advertising solutions to help you better target customers and increase your business Twitter following.

Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets:

The first is Promoted Accounts where the Twitter teams analyze your current following and then it searches for people with similar interests.  When a match is found, Twitter recommends you in the “follow section” to each of these users. Ultimately this service helps you generate additional followers with users who share a common demographic and/or interest.

Promoted Tweets allows Twitter to promote your best tweets in front of a targeted audience.  Again your tweets will be promoted to people who are already interested in your line of work.

Both of these services only charge you when a user interacts with your account.  You set the limit for the budget and then Twitter does the rest.

Twitter Advertising:

Like Facebook, Twitter offers very targeted advertising so that you can generate more followers that will be interested in your business.   You can advertise in the following ways:

• Promoted Tweets – this service expands the reach of certain tweets.  Promoted Tweets can be targeted to search results or to user timelines.
• Promoted Trends – Use Promoted Trends to drive conversations and interest around your brand or product by capturing a user’s attention on Twitter.  This service is still in beta but you can sign up if you want to give this a shot.
• Promoted Accounts – This service allows you to quickly scale a follower-base of advocates and influencers for your brand.  Twitter says that whether you are gearing up for a big product release or looking to expand your online presence, building a strong base of engaged Twitter followers who share and amplify your messages can help your marketing take off. The Promoted Account is featured in search results and within the Who To Follow section. Who To Follow is Twitter’s account recommendation engine and identifies similar accounts and followers to help users discover new businesses, content, and people on Twitter.