Create a Followers campaign

Followers campaigns are the best way to promote your account or grow your audience on Twitter. Building a large base of followers is key to fully leveraging your Twitter presence to drive business results. Followers see your content, retweet, engage, and share it with others. This amplifies your message and can help attract even more followers eager to hear more about what your business has to offer.  

Quickly build your community of followers. When someone decides to follow you on Twitter, you gain a chance to engage with that person over time. Each time you engage with your followers, you create new opportunities for them to share content, make purchases or tell others about their positive experiences.

Below are a few simple questions you’ll want to ask yourself when getting started:

1. Who do I want to follow my business? Think about the different groups of customers that you would like to purchase your product or service. Make sure your targeting selections line up with these groups.
2. How much am I willing to pay for each new follower? The cost per follower on Twitter is set by a second price auction among other advertisers – you’ll only ever pay just slightly more than the next highest bidder. A bid of $2.50 - $3.50 is recommended based on historical averages.
3. How many new followers do I want to gain? Set a goal to help you decide on a budget. This might be a regular daily gain or a specific number by a certain date. For example, if you want to gain at least 10 followers a day, then you would set your daily budget to $30 and your bid to $3.00.

Because Follower Campaigns boost your follower growth, they are best used when you are more likely to be discoverable to people who are existing or prospective customers on Twitter. A robust follower base amplifies the performance when you run other goal based campaigns.

• Drive purchases, leads, downloads, and signups: By choosing to follow you, Twitter users are demonstrating an interest in your product. You have an opportunity to connect with them in meaningful ways to drive actions.
• Increase brand awareness and word of mouth sharing: When you tweet valuable content, Twitter makes it easy for your followers to share it with their friends through Retweets, driving increase reach and awareness.
• Drive web traffic: Once you acquire a paid follower you have the opportunity to engage with them everyday, for free, with your organic Tweets. Your followers are the mostly like to see your Tweets and spend time on your website.

Follower Campaigns are displayed in multiple locations across the Twitter platform, including Home Timelines, Who to Follow, and search results. You may see a Followers campaign if a Follower campaigns is relevant to you. As with Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets, this suggestion is labeled as Promoted to distinguish it from other recommended accounts.  

 Twitter Ads are priced using an auction-based system. There is no set price for the engagements and conversions you acquire. Rather, during the campaign setup process you will specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay for each action acquired through that campaign. This amount is your bid.

Twitter’s cost-per-action pricing ensures you only pay for the specific actions you are looking to drive with your campaign. When you run a Followers Campaign, you will only be charged for the follows you acquire from that campaign. All other actions and engagements (impressions, replies and retweets for example) are free.

When setting bids, it is important to think carefully about the value each campaign action brings to your business and to bid at least this amount. The recommended bid is a good indicator of the amount you will need to bid for your campaign to reach its goal. You will never be charged more than your bid and advertisers are often charged less. If your bid is not competitive relative to other advertisers, your campaign may not serve.

In addition to controlling the amount you pay per action, you also have complete control over the amount you spend overall. After setting your bid, you are prompted to enter a total budget for the campaign and, optionally, a daily budget as well. When your overall budget is reached, you campaign will stop serving until you increase the budget. When your daily budget is reached, your campaign will stop serving until the next day. 

First, log in to your Twitter Ads account. If you have yet to set up your first campaign, you will be prompted to choose a campaign type right away. If you have one or more existing campaigns, click the blue “Create new campaign” button on the main campaign dashboard.  

Choose the Followers option from the campaign picker.

Step 1: Name your campaign and set your campaign dates

Give your campaign a name. We suggest something related to the specific audience you’re targeting with this campaign so that you can easily distinguish between other campaigns you create in the future.

Enter your campaign start and end dates. For steady, consistent follower growth, we recommend selecting the option to Start immediately, run continuously and setting your maximum daily budget to the amount you want to spend per day. For details and more best practices, please see our Campaign Dates and Budgets help article.

Step 2: Select targeting options for your campaign

Choose one of the two primary methods of targeting your Followers campaign. Interests and followers allow you to target users with specific predefined interests or interests similar to followers of specific Twitter handles - including your own, and geographic regions. Using Tailored Audiences, you (or an authorized third party) can target your campaign to Twitter users based on past visitors to your website, email addresses and other data from your CRM database, or lists of Twitter IDs. (learn more).

Targeting @usernames allows you to reach users with interests similar to followers of those accounts. Often times the fastest way to grow your audience of engaged users is to target people who share the interests of your existing followers. Simply check the “Also target users like your followers” box and and your account will automatically be promoted to this valuable group of users.

Interest categories allow you to target a broader audience. We will target users interested in any of the categories you enter, in addition to any @usernames you enter above. For more information on how @username and interest targeting work, please see our Interest and Username targeting help article.

Select the geographic regions you’d like to reach. We recommend targeting any regions where you do business. It is also possible to limit targeting by gender. For more information on how geo-targeting and gender-targeting works, please see our Geo-targeting and gender-targeting Help Article.

• When selecting interests to target, don’t limit your selections to those that directly align with your business.  Think about all the interests your audience is likely to have. For example, the target audience for a bike shop might also include people who enjoy surfing, sailing and skiing.

• Create campaigns for each of your different customer segments. Match your targeting to each segment’s interests. By tailoring your content you can control your bids independently.

• Include 10 - 20 @usernames and interests. Keep them in tightly-grouped categories (industry influencers, competitors, etc.). The People search function on Twitter is a great way to find more @usernames to add.

• Keep an eye on the Estimated audience size box on the right side of the page. This will give you a sense of how many users are included based on your targeting. If it seems too low or too high, add more @usernames or interest categories or delete some of them.

Step 3: Select a Tweet for targeting timeline

Followers campaigns present users with ads suggesting they follow your account in several places in user timelines and profiles. Select the Tweets that will carry your campaign into the timeline. While not required, it’s a good practice to include a Tweet to let potential followers understand your brand better. You can either create a new Tweet that will describe why users should follow your account, or select an existing Tweet from the Tweet selector. Showing your Followers campaigns in user’s timelines makes it easier for you to connect with the large number of users.

Targeting best practices for Followers Campaigns in the web and mobile timeline:

• Do: Include “follow us” in your Tweet

• Do: Let the user know why they should follow you

• Don’t: Add extra links that distract from the Follow button. We will not expand any additional links or pictures.

Followers Campaign in timeline is best used to:

• Highlight special offers or contests that are exclusively available to your followers

• Target your fans or a specific audience with a tailored message that is relevant to them

• Get creative with events and time sensitive messages

Step 4: Set your budgets and bid

Set a total budget for your campaign and your daily maximum. You will never spend more than your total campaign budget, and on any given day you will never spend more than your daily maximum. It’s optional to set a total budget — we suggest only setting a daily budget so that you can continue to gain new followers.

Set your bid based on the value you place on each new follower. Your bid will determine both how well your campaign performs and your average CPF (cost per follow). Your cost per follower on Twitter is set by a second-price auction among other advertisers, and you’ll only ever pay slightly more than the next highest bidder. If you’re not sure what to bid, use the Suggested bid to make sure your campaign gains impressions. For more information, please see our Bidding and Auctions FAQ.

Step 5: Save and launch your campaign

Click the Save campaign button. You will then be provided three options to Launch campaign, Save as draft and exit, or Modify details.

Once you are ready, click Launch campaign to begin your campaign. If you set a specific start date, your campaign will start running on the date and time you selected.