How To Advertise on X
How To Advertise on X
Key Takeaways
Understand your audience and define personas before you launch. Knowing who you are speaking to will determine your ad format, targeting, and content style.
Learn to navigate X Ads Manager to optimise targeting, measure engagement, and adapt in real time.
An integrated media agency like One Day Agency can help plan and manage your paid media strategy, ensuring X fits seamlessly within your broader cross-channel marketing mix.
Advertising on X (formerly Twitter) has evolved far beyond short updates and viral memes. It’s now a dynamic advertising platform where real-time conversations meet data-driven targeting. For brands of all sizes, X offers a chance to engage audiences through immediacy, interaction, and cultural relevance. Whether you are a start-up testing awareness campaigns or an established business scaling global reach, mastering how to advertise on X starts with understanding its ecosystem, audience, and creative opportunities.
Understanding X as a Marketing Channel
X has transformed from a simple microblogging site into a fast-paced, opinion-driven platform where users connect through shared interests, conversations, and cultural moments. What makes X unique is its immediacy. Users log in to stay updated on live events, trending topics, and breaking news.
For marketers, this presents an opportunity to position your brand directly in the flow of conversation. Ads on X appear alongside user posts in timelines, search results, or profiles, allowing your message to blend naturally with real-time engagement.
However, success requires understanding both how people use the platform and why they are there. X users tend to be curious, news-aware, and culturally engaged. They often follow brands that provide insight, humour, or commentary that adds value to their feed. For brands, that means moving beyond promotional content and creating posts that inform, entertain, or spark participation.
Define Your Audience Persona
Before creating any campaign, it is crucial to define who you want to reach. X’s audience skews slightly towards professionals, students, and trend-savvy individuals, but this varies by region, interest, and intent.
Start by asking:
What motivates your audience to use X?
What topics or communities do they engage with?
What tone of voice resonates with them, whether informative, witty, or inspirational?
Once you define your persona, you can segment audiences by interests, behaviours, and demographics within X Ads Manager. X also allows you to target based on keywords users search for, accounts they follow, or conversations they engage in. This level of granularity helps ensure your campaign reaches users who are not only active but also contextually aligned with your message.
To complement this, analyse your organic data. Reviewing who already engages with your existing posts can help refine your targeting for paid campaigns.
Learning and Using X Ads Manager
X Ads Manager is the core tool for building and monitoring ad campaigns. It offers multiple campaign objectives such as awareness, engagement, app installs, website traffic, and conversions. Each objective aligns with a specific marketing goal, for example driving clicks to your landing page or generating followers for your account.
Here’s how to get the most from it:
Campaign Objectives: Choose your goal carefully. Awareness campaigns prioritise reach, while engagement campaigns optimise for replies, likes, and retweets.
Ad Formats: X offers Promoted Ads (standard posts with reach), Follower Ads (to grow your community), and Amplify Ads (which pair your brand with premium video content).
Creative Tools: Incorporate strong visuals, short copy, and hashtags strategically. Keep headlines concise and use visuals to capture attention within the feed’s fast scroll pace.
Analytics: Use the analytics dashboard to monitor impressions, engagement rate, cost per result, and demographic insights.
If you are new to X Ads Manager, it is worth exploring X’s free training resources to understand best practices and campaign optimisation techniques. These help marketers familiarise themselves with performance metrics and creative recommendations tailored to different ad types.
Crafting Content that Works on X
On X, timing and tone are everything. Posts that perform well usually tap into trends, cultural conversations, or relatable humour. Unlike static platforms, X rewards brands that are agile and responsive.
To create high-performing content:
Stay reactive. Align your campaigns with live events, trending hashtags, or cultural moments that matter to your audience.
Be conversational. Write like you are joining a discussion, not broadcasting a corporate announcement.
Use multimedia. Images, GIFs, and short-form videos increase visibility and engagement.
Keep it concise. Even though X allows longer posts now, concise storytelling remains key.
Include a clear call to action. Whether it is visiting your site, signing up, or engaging with a post, clarity drives conversions.
Brands that maintain consistency between organic and paid content also tend to perform better. Paid campaigns should feel like a natural extension of your regular feed rather than an interruption.
Integrating X into Your Broader Media Strategy
Advertising on X works best as part of a connected marketing ecosystem. By aligning your X campaigns with other digital channels, you can reinforce your message across multiple touchpoints.
For example, running X Ads alongside Google Search or Meta campaigns allows you to capture both active intent and passive discovery. Similarly, syncing X Ads with programmatic display or out-of-home campaigns amplifies your message across both digital and physical environments.
At One Day Agency, our integrated planning approach ensures that X is not treated in isolation. We consider how it complements your full media mix, from awareness to conversion, and use data to determine how different channels reinforce one another.
Our team handles everything from strategy and creative to campaign buying and optimisation. Whether you are a small business testing the platform or a global brand scaling multi-market activity, we tailor your budget and approach to fit your goals.
Measuring Success and Optimising Performance
Measurement is at the heart of any successful X campaign. Beyond impressions or engagement rates, track how your ads contribute to your overall marketing objectives.
Some key metrics to monitor include:
Engagement Rate: The percentage of users interacting with your ad (likes, reposts, replies).
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures how many users clicked your link.
Conversion Metrics: Track sign-ups, downloads, or purchases linked to your campaign.
Sentiment Analysis: Monitor replies and quote tweets to gauge audience perception.
By consistently reviewing performance data, you can identify which creatives, formats, and targeting options deliver the strongest return.
Using tools like Google Analytics or integrated platform analytics helps attribute conversions accurately. Combining these insights with X’s native data ensures a holistic understanding of campaign effectiveness.
Final Thoughts
Advertising on X is not just about running ads. It is about understanding a community-driven platform where culture moves quickly and authenticity drives attention. Success requires mastering the fundamentals: knowing your audience, using X Ads Manager strategically, and crafting content that resonates in real time.
At One Day Agency, we help brands unlock this potential by integrating X into a broader, data-led media strategy. Whether you are exploring X for the first time or refining an existing approach, we ensure your message reaches the right people, at the right time, with measurable impact.
To discover how our integrated planning, buying, and creative services can elevate your X advertising strategy, visit One Day Agency or explore our Digital Services page. And learn more about Paid Social, Spotify or Meta!
