Twitter has developed ad products for big budgets (like second-screen targeting tool Twitter Amplify), but it’s also trying to show small and midsize advertisers it’s got their interests in mind.
Twitter on Wednesday rolled out “Quick Promote,” an update to its 2013 self-serve ad platform. The feature is designed to simplify optimization for promoted tweets, making it easy for business owners unfamiliar with ad tech to identify and amplify top-performing tweets within their tweet activity dashboard.
Quick Promote automatically delivers amplified messages via lookalike targeting, finding users with similar interests to the SMB’s follower base.
The Quick Promote feature follows numerous other additions to Twitter’s self-serve ad platform designed for SMBs.
“Last year, we rolled out objective-based campaigns, reports and pricing to make it simpler for businesses to manage campaigns while only paying for actions aligned with their marketing objectives,” wrote Buster Benson, a revenue product manager for Twitter, in a blog post.
Twitter also introduced tweet performance metrics in July, so small and midsize advertisers can compare organic and promoted tweet data based on impressions, views across various devices and retweets.
Both Twitter and Facebook – which introduced an SMB version of Custom Audiences in 2013 and created a small-business council in 2014 – have increased focus on SMB advertisers. For Twitter, this means building out direct-response tools, like lead-gen cards, card-linked offers and experimenting with an ecommerce button.
Many of these tools can also be integrated with standard email and marketing automation systems, according to a beta Twitter small-business advertiser, making it pretty seamless to continue the Twitter chatter offline or on email.
But while these tools will help Twitter drive revenue – which it has consistently been able to do – the microblogging site has another problem: flagging growth of its monthly active users.
As such, the company is also building products to push promoted tweets off-Twitter. Thus far, it has a partnership with content aggregation app Flipboard and expects to have one with Yahoo Japan.
