How to Target Your Competitors’ Twitter Followers for Marketing Success

Running Twitter ads on your competitions' audience on social media is an excellent marketing hack. This way, you can ensure you are targeting an audience interested in what you have to offer. Thanks to Twitter’s audience targeting feature, you can upload your competitor’s followers and show your ads to them.

So if you want to increase your followers, sell your products or become more relevant in your niche, follow our guide on targeting your competitor’s Twitter followers. We will show you how you can use twtData to extract your competitor’s Twitter followers onto an Excel sheet, analyse their followers’ data and target your ads at them.

But first, let us answer some key questions that may be on your mind.

Is advertising on Twitter worth it?

Twitter may not seem like a powerhouse for social media advertising, but it does achieve pretty good results when it comes to SMBs. 63% of the users say that they show support for their local businesses by following them on Twitter, and 85% say they feel more connected to the brand after following them.
Twitter is used by tech gurus, celebrities, journalists and other people who like spreading the word. So chances to go viral on Twitter with a tweet are high, and it can help you build a reputation quickly.
Twitter allows you to upload a list of people you would like to target, so you can download anyone’s Twitter followers you’d like your tweet to reach.
Keyword targeting is a valuable feature of advertising on Twitter because you can target specific people who have demonstrated intent on Twitter.
Since the advertising competition is low on Twitter, it’s cheaper to advertise on Twitter.

How much does it cost to advertise on Twitter?

“But how much will advertising on Twitter cost me?” I can hear you asking. The first thing you should know is that you’ll be paying for performance. Compared to other social media advertising options, your results will not be ambiguous. For example, when you create a followers campaign, you only pay for the number of people who start following your account.

You can expect to pay around $0.50-$2.00 per engagement for promoted tweets and $2-$4 per follow when promoting an account. So if you bid $0.50 to promote a tweet and get 100 engagements (comments, likes and retweets), you’ll only pay $5.

What are Twitter ads?

Twitter ads come in a few different forms:

Promoted Tweets: These are just like regular tweets that allow user engagement such as likes, retweets and comments, but they carry a “Promoted” label in the lower left-hand corner.
Promoted Accounts: You can use this ad to showcase your profile in both people’s feeds and under “Who to Follow” suggestions.
Promoted Trends: These ads show up on the Explore page with other Trending news and topics.
Promoted Moments: This is a collection of tweets that you can display under your account, such as customer reviews, company news, events etc. When you promote a moment, people can see related tweets, allowing you to get various content out there, such as GIFs, videos, quoted tweets, and more.

Since you made it this far, you should be ready to set up your Twitter ad account and begin targeting your competitor’s Twitter followers.

Step one: Download your competitors’ audience

A Twitter account with a genuine following, engagement, verified status, and good content is the one to watch. You can target the audience of such an account with Twitter ads by promoting your best content. You have a good chance of growing your following and engaging new accounts.

If you already share followers with your competitor, it’s important to eradicate them, so you don’t target accounts that already follow you.

First, download your Twitter followers and your competitor’s followers using twtData and put the follower data on the same spreadsheet to remove duplicate accounts.
You should also clean out any bots and inactive accounts from your audience data, so you don’t spend your ad budget unnecessarily. You can read our guide to detect bots here.

Once you have your audience ready, you are ready to start advertising.

Step two: Upload your audience

After logging into your account, go to ads.twitter.com.
Choose your campaign objective and click ‘Next’.

Set your ad’s timeline and budget first, then click ‘Next’.

It’s time to name your Ad Group; this is where you will be able to ‘bulk upload’ your competitor’s audience, so if it’s the only audience you are using, name it accordingly.

Depending on your campaign objective, you can decide which targeting features you want to focus on. You should think about refining all aspects of your audience, so you don’t pay for engagement that won’t end up in conversion.

Under the ‘Country’ section, you can bulk upload the country data of your competitor’s followers or enter it manually. This can be important if you’re selling an item and shipping to only a few countries, for example.
Under ‘Devices’, allow all options and move onto the targeting features. This can be useful if you promote an app, and only have the Android or iOS version ready.
Under ‘Targeting features’, you will be able to bulk upload your competitor’s followers. Just click ‘bulk upload’ and copy and paste the Twitter handles of the accounts you want to target.

Depending on the size of your list, it will usually take a couple of hours for Twitter to process your audience information. You will receive an email once your audience is uploaded and ready to use.

A few tips:

Aim to target at least 30 @handles per campaign to ensure that you’re reaching a substantial audience. Use the bulk upload feature we mentioned above.
Target the @handles that are most closely tied to your business. While very famous individuals or companies may have millions of followers, those millions are not necessarily aligned around a topic relevant to your business.
Focus on segmentation. Segmenting campaigns helps you identify what’s working best. Get better results by monitoring your campaign dashboard closely. For instance, when targeting usernames, we recommend not adding interest targeting into the same campaigns. Instead, you can run a separate campaign with broad interest targeting.
Segment your @handle campaigns by category. For example, try running one campaign targeted to the @handles of your competitors and another targeting the @handles of industry media.

Step three: Finalise the campaign

Finally, choose which tweets you want to promote (You can also select ‘compose tweets’ if you’d like it to only be seen by targeted followers, rather than your entire Twitter audience, useful if you are running a get followers campaign, and for A/B testing content in advance).