Twitter Targets SMBs With A Way To Buy Promoted Tweets In Its Analytics Page

While Twitter expands Promoted Tweets to run on other websites and apps, the social network is also trying to boost usage of them (and revenue from them) on its own platform. Today, it’s announcing a new feature aimed at small and medium businesses it’s referring to as “quick promote“, which will let SMBs select their most popular Tweets and boost them directly from their analytics dashboard in a couple of steps.
The service is rolling out globally starting today, Twitter says.
The idea of having a way to quickly promote a tweet is that it could get SMBs to make more impulse buys of Twitter’s ad products. To date, the main option available to small businesses has been through the company’s self-service platform, launched widely in 2013. While the platform will continue to be available, targeting SMBs on the analytics page will give Twitter a way to provide an ad service closer to where those businesses are actually spending more time.
And ahead of its earnings this week, it’s a sign of how Twitter continues to try to monetise its analytics platform.
To date, Twitter has put a lot of effort into building up its position with big brands, forging alliances with the likes of Omnicom to develop and market its platform to larger advertisers.

Today’s announcement, however, is about boosting the company’s long-tail of business users. Twitter doesn’t break out how many SMBs use its platform today beyond “thousands” — a generic but stale number it has been using for years, in fact since it rolled out its self-serve advertising tool in 2013. It’s been looking for better ways of targeting this large but often elusive sector for a while now.
It seems to have some data that supports trying to push more Promoted Tweets as a way of growing its SMB revenues. “We found that users who see a relevant Promoted Tweet from an SMB are also 32% more likely to visit that business,” Twitter product manager Buster Benson notes.
Twitter will let SMBs add in features through quick promote like action buttons to download content — and eventually(?) the option to buy things with Twitter’s Buy button being tested now — but they will not be able to add targeting to specify mobile or web viewers. That will be something Twitter will determine, along with the price, based on the content of the tweet and the budget that the SMB sets when choose a tweet to quick promote. For example, a tweet with a mobile app promotion card will be targeted to mobile and charged on a CPAC basis.
A video of how it works is below. Twitter is also showing the video in its own tweet, but you cannot embed these (yet) on other sites, it seems, unlike YouTube links.