If you are a small business owner using Twitter to promote your product or service, there are two features the popular microblogging site rolled out in August — targeted and promoted tweets. These features allow you to cost-effectively focus your tweets and elect to have them shown to a specific audience, such as potential customers in a certain geographic location.

Here’s a guide to help you get started.

Targeted tweets: This new type of tweet is great because it allows you to select a certain subset of Twitter users to see it. Subsets are the categories and keywords related to the content of your tweet. For example, if you are the owner of a pet grooming salon, you can select the category “pets”. If you only groom dogs, you can also select the subcategory “dogs.”

Promoted tweets: With promoted tweets, advertisers can purchase tweets based on what kinds of things users do with their Twitter accounts. It also comes with a dedicated dashboard that allows you to track the performance of your tweets in real-time.

A promoted tweet takes into account user behavior. So, you can promote a tweet based on who users follow, what kinds of tweets they engage with on a regular basis and how often they use Twitter. Your promoted tweet will show up at the top of a user’s feed. And, when a user searches Twitter for certain keywords, if your promoted tweet contains the hashtag for that keyword, it will appear near the top of the search results page that Twitter generates. You also have the option of sending a promoted tweet to just the users who follow you. Promoted tweets can also be geo-targeted and directed at a U.S. region or internationally.

Promoted tweets are not “promoted accounts” or “promoted trends,” which can both be pricey to purchase. Promoted accounts are the ones that appear in the Who to Follow section of your Twitter page on the left-hand side. Promoted trends also appear on the left-hand side, but they are those hashtagged words and phrases versus accounts that are in the area of your Twitter page. Both promoted accounts and trends are purchased in blocks of time, which can run you well into six figures for a single engagement.

How to buy: To understand how to buy promoted and targeted tweets, Twitter has developed a webpage, https://business.twitter.com/en/smallbiz/, to help users get started. You can purchase ads for as little as 10 cents per “engagement,” which means each time a person clicks, retweets or shares your ad, you will be charged 10 cents.

As an added bonus, new advertisers can sign-up to receive $100 in free Twitter ads and if you are an American Express cardholder.

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