Looking for ways to refine your Twitter marketing approach heading into the holiday season?

This will help – the team from Twitter Business recently hosted a Twitter Space on how to make best use of Twitter ads, in which they highlighted a range of tips based on data, and the experience of Twitter’s internal promotions team.

You can listen to a replay of the discussion, hosted by Twitter SMB Content Manager Krista Doyle, and featuring Twitter Senior Account Managers Sal Mattos and Isioma Odita, here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key points raised which could help in your tweet marketing journey.

First off, Twitter advises that brands should stay one step ahead by maintaining awareness of key events and/or occasions that are coming up.

Every year, Twitter publishes a major events calendar to help with this, and it can be a key guiding document to help ensure that you don’t miss out on any tie-in opportunities that can help to maximize your tweet performance.

The real-time nature of the tweet feed lends itself to these types of timely, trending discussions, and it can be a great way to maximize your brand messaging, in alignment with usage habits.

In addition to this, Twitter advises that you should look into trending hashtags to get involved in the broader conversation, while you can also use Twitter polls to prompt related discussion and engagement within your brand community.

“For events that are annual, check out the top Tweets from the previous year’s hashtag for inspiration.”

Twitter also highlights the value of visual assets, which can help your tweets stand out in the fast-moving tweet stream.

“It’s important to include visuals that are eye-catching and highlight your product or key message. Incorporating visuals that fit well with the event, occasion, or trend you’re connecting to will help tie your campaign together.”

That advice goes for every social network, with video and GIFs outperforming static images in most respects. But the key point is that you need to consider your visual aspects, which will give you more opportunity to maximize your messaging over basic text messages.

In terms of video, Twitter advises that the ‘sweet spot’ for video creative on the platform is 6 to 15 seconds.

Twitter also notes that concise tweets tend to perform best for brands (between 50-100 characters).

That won’t be universally true, and really, the ideal tweet length is the exact amount of characters and/or words you need to communicate your key message. But if you can, keep it brief, and prompt users to get in touch for more.

Twitter also highlights the importance of an effective CTA in your tweets, as well as variable creative elements:

“Make sure to have a call to action or ask a question so the audience knows what you are trying to get them to do. During your campaign, we recommend using 3-12 unique creative assets to prevent creative wear-out with your audience.”

On ad performance specifically, Twitter says that advertisers shouldn’t make any changes to their ads within the first five days of a campaign.

That’ll enable Twitter’s system to ‘efficiently calibrate your ads’ via the ‘learning period’, in which Twitter’s ad delivery system is measuring user response and performance, in order to optimize targeting.

And when you do update your ads, Twitter says that marketers should seek to make all of their desired changes at once, then let the campaign sit for another 3-4 days to understand the impact before making any additional updates.

These are some helpful notes, which will each contribute to greater Twitter ads success. Though it is worth noting that these are not rules, as such, as you may well violate some of these guidelines and see great performance. But as general guidance, based on past performance, these are key advisory tips to keep in mind.

You can check out a full recap, and listen to the Spaces recording, here.