Los Angeles — Popular micro-blogging outfit is vying for a big bite in a small way. Twitter is unveiling a self-serve advertising to small businesses through promoted tweets and promoted accounts, the company announced in a blog post.
As you might remember, just last month, the micro-blogging network Twitter partnered with American Express to offer advertising space to select merchants. Now, beginning from Monday, eligible American Express cardmembers and merchants will be able to start advertising via Twitter. To participate, they must first register with Twitter here.
They promise it is easy to use, and that your messages will reach the right people via their management systems. The credit card company partnered with Twitter to launch the new platform, offering early access to its customers and a $100 credit for free advertising to the first 10,000 businesses to sign up.
American Express, is handling the notification process and both companies will invite more small businesses into the fold starting Tuesday, and the number of eligible businesses will increase throughout the next weeks.
Initially, it will only be offered to a small group of businesses who will have access to this new advertising opportunity, but as the demand grows up and running, they will include new accounts as well.
Surprisingly, Twitter would not disclose the number of active businesses, although a spokesman allowed that the number of participating small businesses will “steadily increase” in coming weeks. If it works as advertised –no pun intended–this could be a very big deal for the company, one that could allow it to tap into a huge new swathe of potential advertisers.
Moving forward, the self-serve platform democratizes two of Twitter’s ad products–Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts–and makes them accessible to businesses of all sizes, regardless of their budgets.
Twitter for small business (Credit: Twitter)
The two identical ad products allow for geographic targeting of tweets and accounts, and are offered on a pay-per-engagement basis. Promoted Accounts indicates a brand’s Twitter account to users with interests similar to those who are already following the brand. Promoted Tweets take an existing tweet from a brand’s account that is inspiring a lot of engagement and promotes it in search results. With Promoted Tweets, an advertiser pays for each click, retweet, reply, or favorite. Advertisers can set daily spend limitations and specify how much they’re willing to pay for each engagement.
In fact, the self-serve ad platform is Twitter’s first real attempt at becoming a contender in the online advertising war. In finally creating a hands-off system, Twitter has the opportunity to bolster its revenue without additional overhead and, in theory, can now challenge Facebook and Google for online ad dollars. However, the expectations within Twitter is that the new program could have the same sort of impact on Twitter’s business that AdWords had for Google.
Here is the highlights as listed on Twitter’s advertising blog:
-
Get started in minutes: we provide ongoing management of your advertising.
-
No previous advertising experience is required. If you can tweet, you can advertise on Twitter.
-
Gain new followers: Promoted Accounts helps your small business connect with new people who want to hear from you and can spread the word about your business to others.
-
Amplify your Tweets: Promoted Tweets helps your small business get your messages in front of more of the right people. Twitter will take out the guesswork by automatically identifying and promoting your most engaging Tweets.
-
Pay per follower for Promoted Accounts and per engagement (click, retweet, reply, and favorite) for Promoted Tweets.
-
Target the whole world, specific countries, or limit your reach to specific U.S. metropolitan areas.
Twitter last week celebrated its sixth birthday. The micro-blogging outfit now boasts 140 million active users that send 340 million tweets each day. The information network is anticipated to bring in $259.9 million in revenue in 2012, according to eMarketer.
Here is their promotional video for the new platform:
{iframe width=”640″ height=”360″}http://www.youtube.com/embed/3e5H9b9IM_Q{/iframe}