What Twitter’s New Advertising Platform Means for Small Business Marketers

Back in February, Twitter announced that it had partnered up with credit card giant American Express on a new advertising initiative. The program is a part of the social network’s ongoing plan to make its ads more accessible and help brands extend their reach. Small businesses are in line to benefit big thanks to this latest update.

Overview of New Advertising Formats

With the new advertising platform, Twitter is offering marketers a self-serve solution that gives them the freedom to login and customize their own ads. Small businesses can use the platform to take advantage of two formats: Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets.

1. Promoted Accounts – This ad product allows marketers to leverage both the search results and the “Who To Follow” feature on Twitter. Using the company’s recommendation engine, it analyzes accounts to find content, businesses, and people with similar interests then presents them to the marketer via the Who to Follow box.

2. Promoted Tweets – This ad product is built on tweets, the lifeblood of Twitter. With Promoted Tweets, the company uses its system to monitor a marketer’s posts. From there, it selects what is deemed to be the most engaging, and places it at the top of the search results. Promoted Tweets are not like traditional ads. They are essentially regular Twitter updates with much greater reach.

Both Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets have been available for a while now. However, they were not exactly easily accessible. In the past, marketers had to go through the long drawn out process of speaking to a Twitter rep and ordering an advertising account over the phone. With the new ad platform, all they need is an internet connection and a credit card. Small businesses now have the ability to choose how much they want to spend per day, how much they want to spend per follower or engagement, and even the location they want their ads to be targeted in.

Still Some Exclusivity

In November of 2011, Twitter rolled out a self-serve advertising program, but it was only available to a small number of brands. It remains that way today. And while the new platform aims to make ads more accessible, it is currently only available to select businesses as well.

The first lucky few to get their hands on the newly introduced self-serve tool for small businesses  are card members and merchants of American Express. It has been reported that the company is offering $100 in free ad credits to the first 10,000 businesses to sign up and give the new platform a shot.

While Twitter’s new advertising platform is limited in availability, interested marketers will be glad to know that they can contact the company to get on a waiting list. Signing up means they can be instantly notified when the program is being extended to more small businesses.