Advertising on social media has been a dominant force for several years
now. Search advertising has even taken a hit in recent years
due to the amount of time people spend browsing social networking sites.
Google's not trembling in their Adwords boots right now, but
this social stuff is definitely on their radar.
That said, social advertising has had the disadvantage of being
relatively uncertain for a time, due to the platforms and tools that
facilitate it not having as much time to evolve like the ones that
support more traditional online advertising. Twitter, long the number
two social media network in the English-speaking world, is looking to
rectify this by rolling out a feature they call "ads editor" - yes, all
lower case. This allows advertisers to bulk edit the parameters and
copy of their twitter ads using excel spreadsheet uploads. The use of
such techniques is far from new, but it could certainly be a blessing
for those who manage hundreds or thousands of different twitter
advertisements for their clients' campaigns (or their own, for that
matter).
End dates, budgets, targeting criteria, etc can be changed en
masse by simply downloading a spreadsheet of your campaign, making the
appropriate edits, and re-uploading it. Once uploaded, a single click will apply the
changes you've specified to all affected campaigns; it's that easy.
This facility will be especially useful to large-volume advertisers, who have
the budget for massive trial-and-error campaigns based around
hashtags and keywords much in the same way Adwords giants work. They
begin with ads based around thousand of keywords, sometimes with
multiple variants of copy each, and slowly trim the fat, taking away
those that perform poorly and focusing instead on split-testing
frontrunners. In theory, twitter's new ads editor will allow
advertisers to conduct these types of changes with relative ease
compared to the manual editing required before.
Of course, your own marketing savvy will be your
best tool here, but there's nothing wrong with a little time-saving
help from technology, right? This is not available to the
public yet, but twitter is beginning to make it available to selected
advertisers over the next few days. These individuals and
firms will get the first chance to test the new product, before twitter
expects to have the platform fully rolled out for everyone within two to
three weeks. If you're keen to see if you're one of the chosen few for
the test, keep your eyes peeled for a notification from
ads.twitter.com
Early skeptics of the tool have already emerged, arguing that
the use of such a primitive tool as Excel might mean limiting the
capabilities of users on ads editor. For example, finding a simple way
to factor potential reach and suggested bid into spreadsheets will be
difficult, as a spreadsheet will exist as a static, offline document
once you edit it on your computer. If the tool worked in a
browser-based office variant, however, it might be able to make
suggestions in real time in accordance with your edits.
Only time will tell how well the tool actually catches on.
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