Twitter allows you to place promoted tweets in timelines targeted to followers and users who are similar to your followers. These are very similar to Promoted Posts on Facebook. You can take one of your standard tweets and promote it to add that extra boost. These tweets appear in both the timelines of your targeted audience and in search results.
Twitter enables you to target tweets based on the following:
Interests
Keywords in timeline
Gender
Geography
Device
Similarity to existing followers
A promoted tweet says "Promoted by X," where X is the company who paid for the tweet, and it also shows who among your followers follows the company. Make sure your promoted tweets discuss timely and engaging content such as your new ebook, an event, or a new contest.
Promoted tweets use a cost-per-click (CPC) pricing similar to how Facebook ads and Google AdWords operates. Twitter recommends $0.50 to a maximum of $1.50 CPC.
As with any social media lead-generation tactic, make sure you have a dedicated landing page for your offer after a person clicks through.
Twitter offers two other promoted ad options — promoted account and trends. A promoted account is just what it sounds like — you get to promote your account in order to gain more followers. The promoted account is featured in the Twitter search results in the Who to Follow area. The promoted accounts are chosen based on who users typically follow.
When someone searches for a keyword and Twitter sees that a user follows similar accounts to the advertisers, your promoted account can appear in their search results.
For example, see what comes up in the Who to Follow section for a Twitter user who tracks stock information and social media sites — Fidelity Investments, and Instagram and Tumblr.
The other option is promoted trends, although a promoted trend has a hefty price tag of $200,000 attached to it, according to Mashable. What is a promoted trend? If you are a Twitter user, you probably know that on the left side of your home page, Twitter lists hashtags that are trending throughout the day. If you pay for a promoted trend, your hashtag can appear at the top of the list indicated by a promoted image.
The figure below shows an example of a user's Twitter trends. As you can see, most of the trends are related to current events and hot topics. At the top is a promoted trend for an upcoming football game between the Cleveland Browns and the Buffalo Bills. The idea is that a Twitter user sees this is trending and clicks the hashtag or engages with it in some way.
