Twitter is taking off for small business storytelling as marketing. With their self service ad platform up and running for the better part of the year, the company is now enhancing elements for small business marketing as well as making some big changes with how they work with the developer community.
Here’s a quick run down on some of this news and our take too:
Are You Tweeting?
First things first – are you on Twitter? If not make it a priority because along with Facebook this is one of the most important social platforms both today and in the future. At Social Jumpstart we believe Twitter will become increasingly important to your small business marketing and success. Getting started on Twitter is easy too. If you are already tweeting (good work!) you might enjoy these ten Twitter tips too.
Promoted Tweets Enhanced
We’ve been cautious on the use of paid promoted tweets, however, we’re seeing some exciting developments from the company that are encouraging us to now recommend trying them out for many of our clients. Twitter recently added the ability to target by interests at fairly granular level, which offers some intriguing possibilities. Their self-serve platform continues to improve and the performance nature of their pricing is always a plus. Like many social agencies, we manage Twitter advertising for some clients; however, Twitter is making it very easy for a small business to do it themselves as well.
Reporting & Control Enhancements As Well
Just yesterday Twitter Product Manger Andrew Chang @achang announced some very cool updates. First is a new simple chart to visualize your followers broken out by those acquired organically and promoted. This is a major improvement that easily lets you see the impact on any paid marketing you might initiate.
Just as cool is new control over selecting which tweets to promote. Being able to select a specific tweet to promote is something we’ve been waiting to see happen and it is great to have this feature implemented.
API changes – What’s all the fuss?
You might have seen some articles in the press about Twitter eliminating or limiting access to their API and were curious as to what this means. Unless you are in the Web Tech business – probably nothing at all. The changes are basically Twitter taking more control over their own destiny on who and how other sites can link into them and access their data for added value services. A deeper view is here if you are curious.
While these changes are upsetting to some developers as it limits their access to the platform it is a logical step by Twitter to better manage and secure the system. While it may limit flexibility for some (including us) we believe that this is a plus for the vast majority of small businesses over the long run.
And you are more than welcome to Tweet that too!
