Twitter has had their “promoted Tweets” program running for some time now, as part of their effort to turn a profit from the widely used and ever-popular so-called micro-blogging service.
Now, in a long awaited move, Twitter has opened up the process of advertising on their platform to small businesses, in conjunction with American Express, due to launch in March this year.
At present, it appears that this is available only to American businesses, who have a valid American Express card, but I’m sure that it will roll out to everybody ever time.
Growing Demand For Twitter Ads
According to Twitters CEO, small businesses have been requesting access to Twitter ads for some time now, and Twitter has finally developed a platform that will provide them with what they’ve been looking for.
Limited self-service ads have been available to some businesses since late last year, although Twitter didn’t heavily publicise the fact.
Twitters ad revenue experienced remarkable growth in 2011, and with the release of this feature to a wider audience, and even greater revenue growth is predicted.
Self-service ads are the same method that Google used to break into online advertising, and by all accounts, this may be a big success for Twitter too.
Toward A Public Offering
There’s even some speculation that Twitter may use this as the starting point in moving toward a public offering on its 100-million user strong platform.
To start with though, as mentioned above, only small businesses approved by American Express will be allowed to participate, at least at first.
Once it’s opened up to the greater public, we’ll be able to see how they deal with potential problems like spam and fraudulent advertising.