Over the past couple years Twitter has been taking steps toward monetizing itself. In lieu of regular, often annoying methods of advertising such as direct banner ads, Twitter has opted to create a self service advertising system similar to those of Google Adwords or FaceBook. Thus far, the project has been a success and is expanding rapidly. Most recently, they have released two exciting new features in order to ease advertising: follower growth reporting, and an update to the promoted tweets feature.
First is Twitter’s answer to analytics. Follower growth reporting a completely new, but quite simple feature intended only for small businesses at the moment. It is essentially a chart which tracks your cumulative follower growth over time. Followers are tracked, both promoted and unpaid, in corresponding shades of blue. This way you’ll know how effective your ads are, and you can up your game or slow down accordingly. It is getting positive reviews so far and many individual advertisers are requesting the same, or a similar feature for themselves.
The second new feature is an addition to the functionality of the promoted tweets section. Originally, the system automatically selected your newest tweets to display. After many requests from advertisers asking for more control over what tweets are shown, twitter released a method for advertisers to manually choose the tweets they would like displayed. Advertisers now have two options: they can choose to allow the promoted tweets system to continue automatically displaying their newest tweets, or they can choose their own. If choosing their own, advertisers are asked to sort through their tweets and pick a few of their best tweets to be rotated. Alternatively, advertisers can tweet directly from the interface. This feature is useful for anyone who has a particular product, event, or promotion they would like to advertise, or for people who only want their most engaging tweets to be shown. Twitter does remind advertisers to update their selection with new, interesting tweets often to keep their users enthralled.
These two new features have been met with much enthusiasm, becoming chatter of the social media marketing world. Some are saying Twitter is set to rival Google and Facebook in the coming months if their self service program continues to progress. On all accounts the recent additions were a smart move. We’re excited to see what they come up with next, and how other services will respond.
