For Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, it's always been about driving user growth, offering users the best possible online experience and building a Global Town Square where they can communicate and interact in real-time, and conduct a direct, unfiltered and multi-directional conversation with the world in a manner to make a difference. It's never been about going public or reacting to what the competition (namely Facebook) is doing or evening emphasizing revenues, but things are changing at the microblogging giant.
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Twitter is finally showing signs of getting serious about increasing advertising revenues. On February 20, 2013, Twitter announced its new Ads API and is integrating the advertising management tools of five partners. This was quickly followed by announcement on March 5, 2013, that Twitter was offering a Nielsen Brand Effect survey tool which will be available to all of its ad partners in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. Finally, on March 18, 2013, Twitter announced new self-service advertising tools for its self-service small business advertisers.
Twitter Announces Ads API
On February 20, 2013, Twitter announced its new Ads API and in the process made advertising on Twitter easier for advertisers and took a giant leap in sell more ads.
With the Ads API announcement, the microblogging site announced the first of five partners who will be integrating it into their social media management tools. Essentially, agencies and enterprises who already use management tools like HootSuite and advertising tools like Adobe’s Media Optimizer can now buy and run ads right within those environments.
The first five partners are Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TBG Digital. SHIFT produces GraphEffect, a social advertising solution, and TBG Digital is social media advertising agency.
Twitter’s April Underwood wrote in a blog post.
“What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies.”
In a smart move for Twitter, while the partners will provide their clients the ability to advertise on Twitter from within their tools, when those clients become Twitter advertisers, they will be Twitter’s clients, not HootSuite’s, or Adobe’s, or SHIFT’s. In other words, the ad-buying arrangement is consummated via the Twitter API, and the contractual agreement is with Twitter itself.
HootSuite’s Ryan Holmes told VentureBeats John Koetsier by phone.
“We’re setting the accounts up with Twitter. The validation is done on Twitter’s side.”
While Adobe, SHIFT, and TBG are ad agencies and marketplaces, and HootSuite is a social media management tool, one of the really interesting partners is Salesforce, which is again adding to its toolbox in a quest to offer everything any company needs for any purpose, within its cloud. The company is announcing a new Social Ads Platform for Twitter today, which will be part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and likens Twitter’s move to the launch of Facebook’s app platform in 2007.
That might be a bridge too far, but it is a really pivotal move in Twitter’s evolution.
Which is ongoing, as Twitter’s Underwood wrote:
"The Twitter Certified Products Program is also evolving to include ads products. In the coming months, we’ll begin to certify ads products that integrate with the Twitter Ads API and consistently improve marketing efficiency and ROI. This is just the start of our efforts that will give advertisers more choice — and for our partners who are ad tool providers, the Ads API represents a new way for their expertise to meet the needs of their clients."
Twitter Announces Cross-Platform Nielsen Brand Effect Survey Tool
On March 5, 2013, Twitter announced that its Nielsen Brand Effect survey tool is available to all of its ad partners in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. The tool, which presents surveys to Twitter users in a format native to their platform, is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of its Promoted Tweets program.
In order to juice up the desire to use the NBE tool, Twitter has rolled out several results from its survey data over the past few months during its beta test. Twitter syas that Promoted Tweets increase the rate at which users associate a brand’s ‘message’ with its presence on Twitter. So if you want 22% more of whatever that is, then a Promoted Tweet campaign will help you do that.
The second factor that Twitter is emphasizing is that you should ship a Promoted Tweet campaign that is continuous, rather than a one-off. Multiple tweets in a campaign will boost ‘brand lift’. So yeah, that’s pretty logical, but now Twitter has some data from its surveys to back it up.
The third is that people who engage with a Promoted Tweet have an increase in favorability and purchase intent. That’s all well and good for the statistics, but there’s sort of a catch-22 here in that the people engaging (retweeting, clicking, etc) with Promoted Tweets likely already have an affinity for a brand. Someone from Pepsi says that the campaign helped them as well, but you can read the quote in the post.
Twitter's new Nielsen Brand Effect Survey Tool (Click Image To Enlarge)
The surveys look better than when Twitter teased them last year, so that’s good. The iPhone version looks like a nice iOS pulldown and the web one follows the site’s aesthetic. Twitter is careful to note that it does not share individual user info with Nielsen or its advertisers, so presumably this data is anonymized.
Late last year, Twitter announced another Nielsen partnership with the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, a social measurement of TV program popularity based on Twitter data. While that partnership has Twitter data being used to quantify user interest outside the network, the NBE is all about processing data gathered on Twitter to help sell and promote its ad offerings. If you’re sensing a common theme here, yes, data is very important to Twitter. Among other reasons, it’s very much behind the way that Twitter has begun to exert more control over its platform. If Twitter is to survive and flourish, it needs to be profitable, and it knows that (either directly or indirectly) the store of user data that it has compiled and continues to collect is its most valuable asset.
Twitter Announces Improved Ad Targeting for Small Businesses
On March 18, 2013, Twitter announced new self-service ad tools today with much finer-grained targeting controls that will allow small advertisers to craft ad campaigns to exactly the audience they want … and give them access to Twitter’s full advanced control panel for reporting, analytics, and optimization.
With the new additions, Twitter’s ad targeting mechanisms now include:
- Interest: 350 fine-grained interest categories such as car racing or bird-watching.
- Platform: Apps and web access on specific families of devices, such as iOS or Android.
- Fans of specific Twitter handles: People who are similar to those who follow @ESPN, for example.
- Gender: Choose male or female, which Twitter guesses but does not guarantee.
Twitter is very carefully not saying that advertisers can specifically target @JustinBieber’s followers per se. Rather, the 140-character social news network is saying that you can target users who are similar to those who follow certain accounts.
That’s a smart distinction, because otherwise owners of popular Twitter handles could start to feel used, or even demand a piece of the action. But realistically, it’s going to help markets craft a very specific demographic to target on Twitter, and probably get a significant fraction of any particular Twitter users’s followers as well.
The new platform targeting mechanisms are huge, too.
Now app developers, for instance, can target iPhone and iPad users for their iOS apps or Android smartphone owners for their Android apps. In addition, advertisers can specify if they want only desktop and laptop computers, or BlackBerry users, or anyone on other mobile devices (Windows Phone, anyone?).
Click Image To Enlarge
Gender targeting is a little tougher. Users don’t specify their sex on Twitter, so Twitter extrapolates gender by contextual signals like usernames, real names, and even the accounts Twitter users follow. According to Twitter, those signals are 90 percent accurate in determining gender reliably.
Twitter’s self-service platform has been in the hands of a small number of beta testers since last year, and these features were among the most requested, Twitter product manager Ravi Narasimhan said. The new features are going live to a larger but still limited audience now: U.S.-based businesses on a by-invitation basis only.
To access the new features, switch to Advanced in your Twitter ad dashboard if you’re already a customer, or request access at the Twitter Ads self-service site.
COMMENTARY: Evidence that Twitter had greatly improved mobile advertising revenues in Q4 2012, and the addition of the above advertising options and tools, prompted eMarketer to revise Twitter's advertising revenues for 2013 from $500 million to $582.5 million. The Twitter revenue re-foreast was announced today and mentioned in my blog post dated March 28, 2013.
Courtesy of an article dated March 5, 2013 appearing in The Next Web and an article dated March 18, 2013 appearing inVentureBeat and an article dated February 20, 2013 appearing in VentureBeat
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