Use Twitter Ads to target the the followers of your nonprofits competitors

In the same vein as our recent article on piggy backing on your competitors newsletters with Gmail Ads, here's a way to use Twitter Ads to target the the followers of your organisation's competitors.

There's tools out there which allow you to download a list of every Twitter follower for any account. One such example is My Helpster. My Helpster will scrape a Twitter account and download a list of followers from that account. It costs USD $25 to scrape a single Twitter account and provide you with a CSV containing this data. They also provide a service to show you how to do this yourself for USD $150 - so if you're looking to access followers of multiple accounts this might be a more affordable option.

So, once you have your CSV file, you can use those Twitter handles to create a list that you’ll then upload to Twitter Ads. Make sure to select the option to 'add tailored audiences' (find out more about Tailored Audiences here).

You can then create ads to get your organisation in front of the Twitter users who are already following that competitor they're likely to be predisposed to supporting an organisation like yours due to whatever reasons you classify that organisation as a competitor (for example. the specific impact your organisation has in an area, your geographic location, etc). Those reasons may help you craft your message for the next step - the creative.

After setting your budget it's time to write your tweet copy. Here are some tips from entrepreneur, blogger and marketer Jeff  Bullas on Compelling Ways To Tell 140 Character Stories to help you to produce creative for your Twitter ad.

We’ve adapted this technique towards nonprofits from an original post by Larry Kim (Founder and CTO of Wordstream) on competitive advertising strategies.