Twitter’s self-serve ad products hit South Africa

Starting today, small businesses in South Africa will have full access to Twitter’s full range of self serve advertising products, including Tweets and Accounts.

The platform, which has been active for just over a year allows small businesses to access Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products in much the same way as its larger clients do.

According to Barry Collins, Twitter director of SMB for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, the product has been pretty successful in the four countries it already operates in: the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Japan.

“Small business is a huge opportunity for Twitter and a huge part of what happens on Twitter,” he told us.

Backing that sentiment up are stats from global research firm Market Probe, which show that 72% of people more likely to make a purchase from a small business after they follow or interact with them on Twitter and 30% are more likely to recommend a business that they follow on Twitter.

“Successful small business owners intuitively know how to build meaningful relationships with their customers,” said Collins. “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. Today, some of the most effective marketing campaigns we see come from small, local, or internet-only businesses tapping into Twitter’s ability to have conversations in context and on the go.”

Those businesses would however be of little use to Twitter if they tried out the platform and immediately left out frustration.

“Yes it’s an advertising product,” Collins told us, “but we’ll also be helping businesses out”. There’s a sense that Twitter wants this to be as organic a product as possible, which everyone benefits from.

Alongside analytics — designed to help businesses their performance on Twitter, learn more about customer behaviour and adjust campaigns to drive better results — Collins points to the business-focused webinars Twitter provides as well as @TwitterZA_SME (the handle had almost 3 000 followers within days of launching) as examples of the support the social media network provides for small businesses on the platform.

According to Collins, “running events like webinars has proven really effective” for Twitter. At least in part, this is down to the fact that they can be held over part of a lunch hour.

At the same time as the product launches in South Africa, it will go live in Israel, with Collins saying that the plan is to “launch in as many countries as possible.”

While the launch will most likely be welcomed by small South African businesses, it should hardly be surprising. It does, after all, come on the back of an announcement by contextual advertising network Ad Dynamo that it had partnered with Twitter to become the platform’s exclusive advertising partner in South Africa.

Twitter has previously identified South Africa as one of its fastest-growing markets, with an estimated 5.5-million people (a 129% increase in just a year) using the social network in the country.