Effective Ways to Make Money on Twitter

Natalia Tsvetkova Natalia Tsvetkova
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Today, social media is becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools. Twitter is no exception. An increasing number of people use the platform to drive revenue and connect with their audience. The post will teach you how to make money from Twitter and will share easy-to-follow tips to boost your performance on the platform.

Twitter Facts and Statistics Marketers Should Know

To understand the ways to make money using Twitter and develop a successful marketing strategy on the platform, you need to know some facts about it.

Here are the most important Twitter facts and statistics marketers need to know.

  • The character limit on Twitter is 280 words. 
  • There are over 330 million active monthly users and over 150 million monetizable users per day on Twitter as of Q4 of 2019.
Twitter facts and statistics marketers should know
  • Over 500 million Tweets are sent a day.
  • About 80% of Twitter users use the network on their mobile devices.
  • Twitter is most popular in the USA (at almost 60%), followed by Japan, the UK, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Twitter facts and statistics marketers should know
  • About 34% of Twitter users are women and 66% are men.
  • According to Omnicore, the income of over 56% of Twitter users exceeds $50,000 a year.
  • The biggest age groups on the platform are 18-29 year-olds (38%) and 30-49 year-olds (26%).
  • According to Twitter Agency Playbook 2019, the platform users spend 26% more time with ads than users of any other social media.
  • Twitter users watch 2 billion videos on the platform per day.

What Makes Twitter a Good Monetization Channel?

So, taking all these facts into consideration, can you monetize Twitter? Sure. And here are some factors that make it perfect for monetization.

  1. Twitter calls itself the #1 platform for discovery because of its engaged, influential, and educated audience. 
  2. According to Twitter, its users spend 26% more time viewing ads than on other leading social platforms.
  3. With an impressive user-base of over 330 million active users per month, Twitter is a cost-effective way to reach out to your audience.
  4. The platform provides users with top-quality analytical tools.
  5. Twitter allows you to establish two-way communication with your audience and get feedback from them.
  6. You can combine both organic and paid reach strategies on Twitter which will balance and strengthen each other.
  7. Twitter is perfect for timely campaigns. It seems to be cut out for delivering real-time updates, promos, and breaking news to its audience.
  8. You can make the most of the events dashboard and the Twitter marketing calendar to yield better productivity.
  9. You can find out what is trending in your niche with the help of the platform.
  10.  Twitter is a perfect tool for driving traffic to your website as it allows you to embed a link in every Tweet and to publish content more than once.
  11.  The platform facilitates networking with experts and influencers in your niche.
  12.  Being active on the platform boosts your chances to appear in Google search results as Google indexes tweets and information in the bio.
  13.  You can use hashtags to garner more attention from your audience.
  14. Twitter makes it easy to monitor what people are saying about your brand.
  15.  52% of users report buying a product after they discovered it on Twitter.
  16.  Users communicating with brands on the platform report having positive experiences.
  17.  Companies providing customer service on Twitter report a 19% increase in customer satisfaction.
  18.  You can use Twitter search to spy on your competitors.

Twitter Monetization Strategies

But how do people make money on Twitter? Twitter provides numerous opportunities for marketers. Here’re some of the most profitable ones.

Earning on Sponsored Tweets

Once you’ve built your following and have a large audience, you can start monetizing it by publishing sponsored tweets. Sponsored tweets allow advertisers to expand their reach. How do you find people who want to pay you for publishing sponsored ads? You can either contact them (or be contacted by them) or use tools for discovering influencers, such as SponsoredTweets or PaidPerTweet.

Doing Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing on Twitter is one of the best ways to generate revenue. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy in which affiliates promote a product or service and get paid every time a visitor brought by their marketing efforts performs the desired action on the advertiser’s website.

You may wonder how to get paid on Twitter as an affiliate. To make affiliate marketing on Twitter your lucrative pursuit, pick a trustworthy affiliate offer in your niche and provide valuable content that will call out some pain points of your audience. Twitter allows you to place affiliate links in the tweets.

However, don’t get too carried away. Placing too many affiliate links can make your page spammy and you can even get banned on the platform. It’s more effective to drive traffic to your landing page containing affiliate links.

Another piece of advice: shorten your affiliate links. Due to the limited number of characters you can use in a tweet, you may not be able to add relevant text to your link. You can use various services for shortening links, which we have shared in our post.

The other option is joining the Travelpayouts partnership platform for free, which includes a built-in URL shortener. In this case, the deep link generator will return the short partner URL. At the same time, the link will contain the name of the selected brand, which means that the URL will have a high level of trustworthiness and won’t look like spam. You can find out more about the Travelpayouts link shortener in the tool update review.

Promoting Your Own Products or Services

You can use Twitter as a tool for promoting your products or services. Make the most of promotions and discounts to incentivize people to buy, explain how the product you’re offering can solve their problems and provide valuable content to build a rapport with your audience.

You can also sell your services on the platform. Twitter isn’t the marketplace, however it’s an amazing source to gain traffic or for direct interaction with the audience.

Driving traffic to your website 

There is a lot of traffic on Twitter, so don’t miss the boat and use the platform to boost the traffic flow to your website. For this, you should:

  • Pin a tweet containing a link to your website as pinned tweets usually garner more attention.
  • Add a URL to your bio.
  • Embed a Twitter share button on your website.

You can read what to do with the traffic you get from Twitter and how to turn your website traffic into money here.

Providing Lightning-Fast Customer Service

A social media presence helps brands build a rapport with customers and provides quick customer service. Leverage the platform to solve the problems of your audience and provide timely support.

Providing lightning-fast customer service

You can also use Twitter to bring your followers up to speed about the latest updates, promotions, events, etc.

Providing lightning-fast customer service

Building an email list 

You can use the platform to grow your email list. For this, you can use lead magnets like a free guide or a webinar resolving some problems of your audience for example. Providing value to your audience is the key factor when collecting an email list, so make sure your content accommodates your followers’ needs. To grow your email list more effectively:

  • Create an opt-in page you will drive your audience to and embed a link to it in your tweets.
  • Add enticing visuals to your posts.
  • Make your tweets easy to share.
  • Use Twitter cards to get more attention.
  • Leverage Pinned Tweets to drive traffic to the opt-in pages.
  • Place a link to the opt-in page in your bio.
Building an email list

Crowdfunding

You can also use the platform for crowdfunding which is obtaining financing for a task or a project from a large number of people. To run a successful crowdfunding campaign on Twitter:

  • Explain why your campaign is worth the support. For this, tell your audience what problems your project will solve.
Crowdfunding
  • Create compelling tweets to boost engagement and interest of your audience.
  • Find and follow people who may be interested in your project including experts in your niche and influencers.
  • Leverage keywords and hashtags to get more eyes on your content.
  • Ask people to retweet.
  • Say thank you to people who have supported you.

Displaying Ads on Your Twitter Feed

You can monetize your presence on the platform by placing Twitter ads on your Feed. To sell ads on your Feed, become a member of a Twitter advertising platform, for example, Twittad, SponsoredTweet, Adly, etc. You can also join the Twitter Media Studio to place in-stream video ads into your Twitter video content.

Top Tips to Tweak Your Twitter Campaigns for Success

  1. State clear-cut and achievable goals for your Twitter campaigns.
  2. Before diving deep into Twitter marketing, study your audience and competition on the platform.
  3. Create a beautiful Twitter name and a Twitter handle which appears after the @ sign in your profile URL. Make sure they are easy to remember and reflect your brand’s personality. You can use your Twitter name in the Twitter handle.

But if you choose not to, don’t use numbers and underscores in it and avoid using keywords so you don’t look spammy.

  1. Make the most of “trend jacking”. This means you should discover what is trendy in your niche and use it in your marketing strategy.
  2. Schedule your Twitter campaigns and post consistently. There are many tools on the web to help you with the task, for example, Socialbakers, Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck, etc.
  3. Make your tweets concise and pithy. If you want to get a longer message across, place a link to a post in your blog.
  4. Make sure you use high-quality visuals in your tweets to make them more memorable and engaging.
  5. Leverage relevant keywords and hashtags to get more eyes on your content. However, don’t overdo it and use no more than three hashtags in a post.
  6. Get your followers involved in a conversation by asking them questions and running polls. It won’t just boost engagement, but it will also provide you with insights about user opinions.
  1. Create a brand-specific hashtag to boost your brand awareness and get easily discovered by your audience.
  1. Repurpose the best-performing tweets to boost visibility. However, don’t post content in the same form. Make some slight alterations in the images, texts, and headers.
  2. To boost engagement with your content, start interacting with the content of your audience first. Comment on people’s tweets, make retweets, and respond quickly if a customer contacts you.
  3.  Take note of the best posting times which are 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., Monday through Wednesday for B2C and 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday or Thursday for B2B.
  4. Leverage video content in your tweets because it’s dynamic and boosts engagement.
  5. Don’t be afraid to ask your audience for retweets. Besides, you can incentivize your audience to retweets by offering them a freebie or a discount.
  6. Don’t overload your audience with content. Publishing one to three times a day is considered the perfect frequency and results in high engagement levels.
  7. Don’t publish your tweets in bulk. Make sure you space your tweets out.
  8. Use Twitter cards to make your Tweets click-enticing and benefit from extended analytics features. There are several types of Twitter cards, including: 
  • Summary cards which contain a title, description, and a thumbnail, and they give users a preview of content they’re going to read.
  • Summary cards with a large image which are similar to the summary cards but also feature a prominent image.
  • App cards which allow users to download a mobile app from Twitter.
  • Player cards featuring video, images, and audio.
  • Use compelling CTAs in your tweets in contrasting colors. This can give you a 75% higher click-through rate in comparison to low-contrast CTAs.
  • Use Twitter to deliver up-to-the-minute content to your audience.
  • Combine organic and paid reach in your campaigns.

Paid Advertising on Twitter

Twitter advertising allows marketers to reach out to people who are not following them, grow their community, increase traffic influx to their website, boost conversions, generate leads, etc. Twitter ads don’t interfere with user experience as they blend into the timeline feed and are perceived as ordinary tweets. Not all accounts are eligible to advertise on Twitter. Firstly, an account should comply with Twitter Ads policies. Pay attention:

  • Your account must have profile and header photos that are not GIFS.
  • There must be a URL in your bio that represents your brand and promoted product or service.

To take part in the Twitter ads program, make sure your account is public, not deactivated and suspended.

Types of Twitter Ads

There are several ad types available on the platform.

  1. Promoted Tweets are ordinary tweets that marketers pay to be displayed on Twitter. People may comment on them, retweet them, like them, etc. Promoted tweets look like ordinary tweets but have a Promoted sign on them.
  2. Promoted accounts are the type of Twitter advertising that allow marketers to display their account to people who might be interested in it. They have the Promoted sign and the Follow button.
  3. Promoted trends are the ad type which allow you to promote a hashtag. You find such ads in the Trends for You section and they are marked with a Promoted sign.
  4. Automated Ads.

If you are a novice in social media advertising, you can switch to the Twitter Promote Mode which promotes your first 10 tweets daily. The mode costs about $99 per month.

How to Set up a Twitter Ads Campaign

  1. Create a Twitter ads account.
  2. Set the goals for your ad campaign. You can choose from a wide range of objectives including: 
    • Video Views
    • App Installs
    • Website Clicks or Conversions
    • Tweet Engagements, Awareness, Followers, etc.
  3. Name your campaign, set a daily and a total budget, and start and end dates.
  4. The next step is to set your targeting options. You need to set your audience demographics such as age and gender and choose their location, technology, and language.
  5. Review your campaign before launch.

Best practices of Twitter advertising 

Here are some easy-to-follow tips to help you make money on Twitter ads.

  1. Incentivize people to act quickly. Create limited-time offers and urge people to take immediate action. For this, use such phrases as “low stock,” “sign up now,” etc.
  2. Make sure you introduce your brand in the ad copy, but do it briefly.
  3. Use color in your ads to drum up people’s attention. However, use the colors that align with your brand’s personality.
  4. Create ads focused on people’s immediate needs, for example, on seasonal offers.
  5. Create effective CTAs.
  6. When running a sale, put emphasis on the percentage discount, not the amount of money customers will save. 
  7. Offer freebies such as guides, tutorials, e-books, checklists, etc.
  8. Leverage A/B testing to see what performs best for your audience.
  9. Make the most of Twitter targeting options.
  10. Jump on the bandwagon and embed the trendiest hashtags in your niche.
  11. Leverage influencer marketing as people trust word-of-mouth recommendations more than traditional advertising methods.
  12. Take advantage of important events such as the World Cup to boost your marketing efforts.

How to Track Your Campaigns on Twitter

There are a lot of tools you can leverage to analyze your Twitter campaigns. However, Twitter analytics is the go-to free tool which provides users with insights about their performance on the platform. You can get access to Twitter analytics in your profile. For this, tap your profile and choose the Analytics section or you can use the link http://analytics.twitter.com/.

In the Account Home, you can get information about top-performing tweets, the number of followers and profile visits. You can also see some influencers in your niche.

In the Tweets section, you can get insights about how well your tweets perform including Impressions, Engagements, the Number of Links Clicks, Retweets, Replies, Likes. And, you can get information about your Promotion Tweets.

You can also track your video activity in the Videos section. Here, you can see the number of video views and their completion rate.

In the Conversion Tracking section, you can get insights about how you get customers from Twitter. You can get information about your website and mobile app events, create audiences according to people’s behavior on your website, and optimize for conversions.

To start tracking conversions, you need to create a website tag and install it on your website.

You can use Twitter Cards and Ads to get even more insights on your performance on the platform. There are also third-party tools you can leverage to track your Twitter performance, including SproutSocial, Brandwatch Consumer Research, Buffer, Twitonomy, Tweepsmap, etc.

Can You Make Money on Twitter in 2020?

No doubt. Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide and it’s a gold mine of opportunities. You may also wonder: How much money can you make on Twitter?

The earning potential of the platform is unlimited and experienced Twitter marketers earn well into six figures. So, implement the tried-and-true Twitter strategies we’ve shared with you, think outside the box, build a rapport with your audience and provide solutions to their pain points.

If you play your cards right, your efforts will not go waste and you’ll be able to make Twitter your lucrative pursuit.

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