When you’re trying to take your business online or improve the efficiency of your online marketing campaigns, things can get confusing. Should you be advertising on all of the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords? Do you have the funds for it? Do you have a team that can create custom content that works on each platform? Those are all questions you need to ask yourself, but often times people don’t get past “Is it worth advertising on XYZ platform?” Let’s take a look at Twitter, especially since their new app Vine has been released.
The Latest on Twitter
Twitter has always been a sturdy and highly interactive social platform. It’s sole design is for sharing information – whether trivial or important – in short 140 character bursts. Anita Li for Mashable reports some of the latest information about Twitter and it’s good news for the company. She writes, “Twitter is now the fastest-growing social platform on the planet, beating Facebook and Google+ for the top spot, new research suggests.”
This recent growth has jumped the percentage of the entire internet population who use the service actively to 21%. As Twitter gains more global and local reach, its viability as an advertising service increases. If it keeps this pace, Twitter will have a strong case for gaining more advertising revenue.
Twitter’s Foray into Ads
Twitter has slowly been entering the advertising world. Early criticism when Twitter only had 12% of internet users on the site had some claiming that the ads weren’t worth it and were too hard to track. One article by Victoria Black on BusinessWeek called ads on Twitter “hit or miss with small business” with some seeing great success and others thinking it was a waste of time and money. On the other hand, one blogger noted a 300% growth rate in followers over 48 hours of ads and promoted tweets.
Twitter has been constantly improving its ad service for those paying for promoted trends, accounts, or tweets. As the number of users grow on Twitter – which the latest news above shows us is accelerating – Twitter ads will only grow in effectiveness. Their analytics and targeting capability is always being improved, as it’s the major pull for businesses to advertise on the service.
A Vine Grows
This is the perfect time for Twitter to be expanding and improving its ad service. Last week Twitter unveiled its unique app Vine to the world. Vine allows for 6-second video to be tweeted just as a text-based tweet can. The possibilities for how people and businesses can use Vine are almost limitless. I wrote a post about how you can use Vine right now, but there might be an even more effective way to take advantage of Twitter’s growth, Twitter Ads, and the Vine app.
Why Twitter Vine May Soon Be The Best Way to Promote Your Business Online
Beyond using Vine simply to promote your brand with tweets to followers, combining Twitter Ads with Vine might be a recipe for even greater success. Exposing new people to promoted tweets or trends that simultaneously supply a memorable or intriguing video will be able to nab any business hundreds of followers. Plus, there’s always the chance a video can go viral – it would already be on the fastest network for sharing information on the net.
Jeremy Waite at Storify convinced me with his post about Vine from late January that making an effort to combine Twitter Ads with Vine will be increasingly more effective than other platforms. At the very least it will make Twitter Ads highly competitive.
Vine is perfect for the now. It catches Twitter up as not only an information and text-based service, but also as a media service in its own right. Jeremy’s seven reasons why he thinks Vine will be big – and by extension why I think Twitter Ads with Vine will rock online advertising – are the following:
- 1. Vine is already “the biggest social network on the App store.”
- 2. Vine is essentially “Instagram on Steroids.”
- 3. “Our Average Attention Span is