Last week, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo finally revealed his company’s claim, related to launching a self-service advertiser platform during 2011. It took them fourteen months to get it into action. Finally, Twitter confirmed that select marketers began testing such a platform in November.
Twitter’s PR representative, Matt Graves, issued the following statement via an email, “These advertisers can now set up and run their own Promoted Products campaigns and pay via a credit card. This is an important step in continuing to grow Twitter’s business. Our Promoted Products can help small and medium-sized businesses build their audience on Twitter and better engage with the people they want to reach.”
Graves even noted, “Earlier [in November], Twitter began testing self-service advertising with a handful of existing advertisers.” He even added, “As with all of our advertising efforts, we’re starting small, testing carefully and making improvements on [it] as we learn what works. We will slowly roll this capability out to more advertisers in the coming weeks and months.”
This would open up a whole new horizon in the world of Twitter advertising. The micro-blogging giant had launched Promoted Tweets in April 2010, which only had marketers asking for more as they showed interest in wanting to buy the ad units, that is Promoted Trends or Promoted Accounts.
Maybe since then the site heads had planned to go a step ahead to make the marketers dream come true. A self-service platform – first mentioned by Costolo in September 2010, was in making since then, which was expected to bolster the market and the needs of both marketers and Twitter itself.
Twitter’s chief revenue officer, Adam Bain, said ”Twitter advertisers do not seem to mind the restrictive 140 character limit and claimed that is partially due to promoted tweets resulting in much higher conversion rates than similar online channels. The 3% to 5% overall conversion rate for Twitter advertising is substantially higher than the typical 0.5% conversion rate traditional display ads produce.” Bain stressed his noting that the higher conversion rate is due to the user engagement and stated “the return on investment for marketers is insane.”
eMarketer, a research firm, predicts that Twitter’s ad revenue will hit nearly $140 million in 2011. This is a whooping rise as compared to the last year’s raking, which was $45 million. So, the rise would be around 210% of the last year’s count. It was even forcasted that Twitter ads sales will reach $400 million in 2013.
For its working, the new platform enables advertisers to use a self-serve system to purchase advertising without speaking to a human
However, this is still in its beta stage and is currently being tested with only a limited number of advertisers. Twitter indicated that this new platform will be rolling out to a much larger group of advertisers in the coming weeks.
It can be noted that Twitter, with this platform, would make it competitive for products like Google AdWords and other in the market.