Twitter launches ads for small businesses

Twitter adverts have, to date, been the preserve of established brands. And it’s been good for them. Now the social network will be making them available to small businesses.

The social network claims that small business users will now be able to purchase ads through an automated system, much like Google’s. According to Twitter, “the system makes it simple for companies of any size to grow their businesses using our Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products”.

According to the LA Times “Advertisers will decide how much they want to spend on ads and where they want the ads to appear, and they’ll write their own messages no longer than 140 characters”.

Twitter claims that the service builds on a history of small business users taking full advantage of the social network:

Successful small business owners intuitively know how to build meaningful relationships with their customers. They were the first to use Twitter to talk with consumers in real-time, and their creativity demonstrated Twitter’s potential as a marketing platform.

The service will initially only be available to US users with American Express credit cards. The credit card company announced that it would be giving “$100 in free advertising to the first 10 000 eligible businesses to sign up”.

Twitter has been slow to roll out its various revenue generating products, preferring to build up its user base first. Twitter chief Dick Costolo told CNBC, however, that small business owners had been “banging down the door” for the opportunity to buy ads.

The new offering will go live in late March and until it does so people will still have to go through a Twitter representative in order to purchase ads.