Running an ad campaign on Twitter provides some interesting benefits. If you’ve ever tweeted something out and wondered how successful it was, once you become a Twitter advertiser you’ll get tools that let you see performance stats on all your tweets. That alone is worth the price of admission, in my opinion. Once logged into Twitter, under your Profiles and Settings, click Twitter Ads to get started.

Twitter provides some good info on what people do with your tweets. Under the Analytics page, you can see your most popular tweets, find the number of impressions they made (number of times they showed up for other people), the number of engagements, and the engagement rate percentage. Obviously, those tweets with a higher engagement rate are more successful than others.

Engagements include detail expansions, likes, when a user clicks on your profile from the tweet, retweets other users give you, clicks on links in the tweet, number of people who decided to follow you after reading the tweet, hashtag clicks, and engagement with media linked in the tweet.

Under Promotions, Twitter lets you pay to keep a tweet active. For instance, it can show up in your followers’ tweet streams or stay near the top of a hashtag list. Twitter will offer goals for your tweets, such as link clicks, or additional followers. These vary by price. The more you pay, the longer the tweet stays active, and the greater number of results. Ten dollars is a reasonable sum to play around with to get a feel for what you’re doing.

Twitter ads can easily get expensive, but they do seem to be one way to spread the word about a book. Again, book sales seem to be a numbers game. If a hundred people look at your book’s page online, maybe a few will buy it. Paying too much for people to look at the page will quickly outstrip the royalties received from sales.