For years, businesses have used Twitter to reach customers and spread their marketing message for free. And until recently, only big brands were able to use Twitter Ads to promote their Tweets and accounts to the masses. Luckily, in late April Twitter Ads became generally available to all U.S. users. Finally, small businesses have the ability to expand the reach of their Tweets and accounts without going through account managers or committing to a huge budget. Now we’re going to help you get started with Twitter Ads so you can test the channel for yourself and see how it can grow your business.

Reach More Customers

You’re probably already using Twitter for your organic marketing efforts and have seen the value of the medium. Twitter Ads can take your Twitter account and expand it to reach more customers at scale. Use it to grow your presence by either promoting your account to new followers or use it to amplify your Tweets and promote your message. Twitter Ads even has powerful targeting features to let you reach your customers by keywords, interests, location, device, and gender.

Use it to grow your presence by either promoting your account to new followers or to amplify your Tweets and promote 
your message.

Free $50 Twitter Ads Credit

We built AdStage Express because we know the value of running ads on multiple networks. You never know how much a network can impact
 your business until you test it. While you can’t yet launch new Twitter campaigns through Express, we have teamed up with Twitter to offer our users $50 in free Twitter Ads credit . We are working hard to add Twitter to the suite of networks we already support, but in the meantime, if you’re new to Twitter Ads and based in the US, be sure to claim your free credit before creating an advertiser account and then test the network for yourself.

Just 4 Steps From Creation to Launch

If you are eligible for a Twitter Ads credit you will receive a confirmation email directly from Twitter. To get started visit ads.twitter.com and sign in using your existing Twitter account. You’ll be presented with a welcome to Twitter Ads, an explanation of the two types of promotions, and an overview of the 4 steps involved in getting started. Click “Get Started” to... you know, get started.

1. Select Your Targeting

First, you’ll select the locations you’d like to target with your ads. For example, I chose the “San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose” metro area for my ads.

• You can also target people based on the accounts that they are likely to follow. This is where you can add industry influencers. For example, if I were targeting SEO professionals, I would add @mattcutts .
• Clicking “More targeting options” expands a drawer with three more targeting options: interest categories, devices, and gender.
• Throughout this step, a counter in the top right indicates the predicted size of your audience. Making your audience too narrow will limit your reach, so be mindful of it. The actual volume of your campaign targeting will depend on both your budget and how frequently your audience logs onto Twitter.

2. Choose Your Promotion

In this step, you can select the Tweets you’d like to promote to your audience. You can choose one or more of your previous Tweets, or compose a new Tweet and it will be eligible for promotion. If you choose to promote your account, it will be promoted according to the targeting you set in the previous step.

3. Set Your Budget

Now you can select which types of promotion to continue with, along with their corresponding bids and budgets.

• To promote your Tweets and get your message out there, click “Promote my Tweets.” Then set a maximum daily budget and a max bid per engagement. You’ll pay for an engagement when a user clicks on, retweets, @replies, or favorites your Promoted Tweet.
• To promote your account and get more followers, click “Promote my account.” Then set a max daily budget and the price you’re willing to pay for each follow generated by your promoted account.
• Then click Save to continue

4. Provide Your Billing Info

This is where we all get shaken back to reality: you’ve got to give a credit card to continue. Provide your billing information and click continue.

That’s it! You’re now presented with an overview of your campaign where you can verify your settings.