Running Twitter ads in the run-up to an election is one of the most basic campaign tactics but one that many campaigns still get horribly wrong. Here, we are going to go over the how-to of getting your political advertising up and running.
First though, let’s take a look at why you might do this. The main reason for running an ad campaign is to get your message out there to your voters. For this, Twitter is still the best way of reaching people because it has the greatest reach among voters and it can be targeted very specifically by geography and voter demographics.
The other reason we would always recommend Twitter as a starting point for social media ads is that it is really easy to use and, once you are set up you can push out ads very quickly in response to changing campaign issues.
You will first be asked to clarify the goal of your campaign. We would suggest either Awareness or Website clicks. Awareness will see you charged based on the number of times the ad is delivered and Website clicks based on the number of times your ad is clicked by a user.
Next you will be asked to name your campaign and set a start and end date. We would always recommend setting an end date and name your campaign quite specifically so that you can clearly see the difference between campaigns as they grow.
Selecting your audience is the next step and can be done in a very targeted way by geography and demographics. In addition to this, you can then target by the user's Interests (based on their interactions on Twitter) and, best of all, by keywords. Keyword targeting and hashtag targeting allow you to narrow your focus to people interested in specific issues and things that might be very topical. This is the great power of Twitter.
Next, you can set your daily and lifetime budget. You should have a lifetime budget, in the same way, that you have an end date set for your campaign. This gives you better control.
Finally, you will need to build your creatives, in other words, build your ad. This should involve a really good quality image (Twitter will prompt you as to the size dimensions that are optimum, but you can assume that a medium sized, landscape image will work). In terms of the written copy, you should try to insert your message clearly and try to use a related
hashtag or @handle for relevance.
Best of luck and happy tweeting!
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Listening to our current users, we are aware that there can be an internal struggle of team management when it comes to organizing quickly. To get people out on doors, the back and forth over Whatsapp, Messenger, and (insert other apps here) can be endless. We aim to streamline this process for you with Ecanvasser. Now organizers can commit via the Walk app (their canvassing app!) and get notified in the run-up to the event so that they don’t forget. By building it into the door knocking process life has gotten a lot easier for campaign managers.