For many years, when it comes to advertising online, pay per click advertising and Google AdWords have been the market leaders and the best program to use. There are many reasons for this such as the ease of use of PPC, the cost efficient solution to advertising it provides and the contextuality of the traffic it has the potential of targeting for you. However, this does not mean every other form of advertising online is ‘not good’. In actual fact, there are many forms of advertising online that are good and Twitter is becoming one of them. Here are three reasons why Twitter is actually pretty great for online advertising.

Can Be Free, Can Be Paid

Twitter is great in the sense that you can advertise through two different ways. You can either pay for your tweet to appear as an advert on Twitter user’s timeline or simply tweet – one is paid and will most likely gain more traffic while the other one focuses on becoming popularly naturally for free.

Think of this as organic SEO vs paid search traffic. Both are good for different reasons. The same principles can be applied to paying for tweet location compared to tweeting for free.

Tweet Activity

One of the main concerns I did have with Twitter is the lack of information about how successful your tweets were in getting traffic. Yes, you could have found out how many clicks your tweet got by analysing the statistics of your landing page. But, other than that, how successful was the tweet? Thanks to an innovation from Twitter, it is now possible to look at the tweet activity of any of your tweets now which lets you view a range of statistics such as:

• Total impressions for the tweet.
• The number of engagements the tweet got.
• The percentage of people that viewed a photo or video in the tweet (if the tweet has a video or photo embedded into it).
• The percentage of people that clicked onto the tweet to view the tweet clearer.

As you can see, this is quite a step-up for advertisers on Twitter since now they have statistics which will tell them exactly how well the tweet is performing. This will help advertisers use a trial and error technique to improve their tweets on Twitter for better engagement with their target market.

Twitter is Popular

Just like with any good advertising program, to really make a success of it, it needs a wide audience to advertise to. This is potentially one of the many reasons why PPC for Google is so good: because they can reach out to millions (if not billions) of people using their Google search adverts and display adverts on millions of publisher websites.

This is a reason why Twitter is a great platform to advertise on. There are millions upon millions of active Twitter users every day. More importantly, the adverts are well blended into the timeline of users which means engagement with them will be far greater than, say, an advert on Google search results.