What Twitter Advertising Means For Your Brands

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What Twitter Advertising Means For Your Brands

Jan

By Bridget Johnson | Account Specialist

Twitter launched its advertising program in April 2010 with six advertisers signed up to employ Promoted Tweets. Since its initial foray into paid advertising, the platform has added Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends to its offerings, and boosts a clientele of 2,400 marketers. November 2011, Twitter confirmed testing its first self-service program with fewer than 20 existing advertisers, and cites the platform will be available to the public early this year.

Aside from the self-service ad platform, Twitter recently unveiled enhanced brand profiles, which are being offered slowly to select partners. Two of the major differences in the potential brand pages include the ability to create a custom banner section at the top of the page, as well as a stationary Promoted Tweet section located above the tweet timeline, where one tweet is featured regardless of when it was published.

What does this mean for your brand?

Twitter advertising is growing, though slowly – use this time to determine whether your brand message and constituency is a good potential fit. Twitter representatives have been careful to clarify that the slow moving nature of advertising development is intentional and rooted in avoiding turning users off via an ad overload. Now is the time to examine the services offered – Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends – and determine whether your brand’s audience will respond to these offerings in a way that leads to conversions. In making these considerations now, your brand can be prepared for competitive adoption when the services do become publically available.
The forthcoming self-service platform will offer a convenient and efficient testing ground. Currently, the only avenue to participate in Twitter ad buying is via direct communication with a sales representative. The new platform, which is being compared to Facebook, will allow individuals to build and run their own promoted product campaigns and pay with a credit card. This lack of red tape will provide an unprecedented amount of control, as well as added efficiency.
Social media pages rank well for branded searches in search results. The enhanced profile presents an opportunity to present and engage users in your brand message in an environment where one-on-one communication is a mainstay. The likelihood that this profile will land on top organic results is high, thus exploring options for optimization and customization is key.
The custom banner section can promote engagement in a marketing message. Whether this message contains product release announcements, company headlines, contest details, cross social media promotion, contact and business information, or sales and deals, the opportunity to highlight a call-to-action with such visibility is unprecedented on the network.
New Promoted Tweet location facilitates a content focus among constant updates. Currently, with each new tweet, a prior, perhaps more central message is pushed further and further below the fold; to keep a tweet’s message visible, one must repost, which can appear like spam to frequent visitors. This new feature presents another opportunity to highlight content such as that aforementioned – promotions, personalized messages from stakeholders, or product information.

Like the self-service platform, enhanced profile pages will be available to a wider audience as the year progresses. Check back here for further developments on these initiatives.

References:

http://blog.twitter.com/2011/12/lets-fly.html

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2132181/twitter-jumps-brandwagon

Posted in Featured, Social Media