Twitter advertising is about to get serious

The way businesses advertise on Twitter looks like it is about to change. Rumours have been flying around that the social network is going to release its advertising API sometime in Q1 of 2013. The release of the API would make large scale Twitter advertising campaigns a reality and improve targeting and analytics tools.

By Gabriella Griffith at Prelude

This would give Twitter, which already rakes in a reported $288.3m in global ad revenues a massive boost. The social network hasn’t confirmed the release but it would go a long way to explaining how the company forecasts revenues of $1bn in 2014.

So why do we think the launch is coming so soon? The story was broken by TechCrunch a couple of days ago. According to many sources spoken to by the site, Twitter has started to approach social media marketing agencies, briefing them in advance of the release.

Twitter has been making a number of changes recently which appear to be geared toward servicing businesses more efficiently. When it changed the profile settings back in September, it announced that this was a “richer way to showcase your brands and engage customers.”

Also, earlier this month, Twitter opened up the advertising function to a swathe of new markets around the world – giving advertisers the ability to launch geographical campaigns.

Advertising on Twitter now

Advertising on Twitter has been in action since 2010. At the moment, this revolves around Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Promoted Accounts are used to grow your follower base. Twitter will look at your current followers and find people with similar interests. When they find a match – they promote you in the “Who to Follow” section. These can be targeted at a specific geographical location.

Promoted tweets are generated directly from your own tweets. Twitter will scour for tweets with a large engagement and promote these “best” tweets to the top of users’ feeds. There is also an option to manually select which tweets will be promoted.

For both of these services you can chose how much you want to spend each day. You only pay when  there is an  engagement, so if a Promoted Account gets a new follow or a Promoted Tweet is responded to.

These methods aren’t really suitable for large campaigns as they have to be uploaded one at a time.

So what does this new API release mean?

By offering advertisers the API it will allow bigger advertisers and their agencies to run campaigns across multiple platforms and to scale their campaigns more efficiently. Choosing tweets one at a time is incredibly time consuming.

While the changes are aimed at attracting large advertisers and their agencies, it will no doubt alter the way advertisers of all sizes use the platform in the long run.

“API integration is the logical next step for Twitter and a path that Linkedin and Facebook have both gone down; with the amount of data flowing in and out of the platform the opportunity for smart agencies and advertisers is obvious,” says Guy O’Brien, associate director at marketing agency Bite.

“This year should see a really big shift in marketing budget to the platform as the early signs are that engagement rates are significantly higher than many other channels. Bite are very much on board!”