After being available only to select businesses for about a year, Twitter Ads is now available to almost all U.S. companies that want to use it, Kevin Weil, Twitter Senior Director of Product for Revenue, said today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Twitter’s ad platform is a self-service solution that lets advertisers buy Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. The service gives brands a larger opportunity to get exposure to Twitter’s more than 200 million active users rather than simply pushing messages through standard tweets.

These ad products also let advertisers target users by geography, and they are offered on a pay-per-engagement basis. Offering these products to more businesses makes Twitter another powerful force alongside Facebook or Google in social advertising.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii.

Twitter’s recent announcement of an Ads API hardly comes as a surprise. The rumour mills have been predicting this for nearly two years now, and with Facebook and LinkedIn already having made similar moves, it was merely a question of just when this was going to happen.

The move is widely being touted as a very wise one by Twitter — and for the right reasons. It enables Twitter to tap into the expertise of third party application developers with a proven track record of developing marketing platforms that help advertisers in launching, managing and optimizing their campaigns at scale.

Regardless of how big your advertising budgets are, Twitter’s Ads API and the value that it promises to deliver via third party ad solutions providers is unquestionable.

But how exactly will this impact marketers and marketing budgets? What tangible outcomes can advertisers expect from these third party ad solutions providers in the not so distant future?

Buying Twitter ad units just got easier

Balachandar Ganesh

Up until yesterday, the only way you could buy advertising real estate on Twitter was either off their basic self-service interface or from their direct sales team. Not only is this far from optimal, it is also extremely difficult to scale if you want to run frequent and multiple campaigns. There’s always been a demand for gaining more eyeballs on Twitter through advertising (Twitter sees nearly half a billion tweets on the platform every day!) and with this announcement, Twitter just widened the supply pipes.

The Ads API is a definitive step towards building a developer ecosystem similar to that of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program. As marketers, it gives you the flexibility to buy and manage Twitter ad units from a variety of developers, and arguably, do so easily and effectively.

Creating ad campaigns on Twitter just got easier

Creating and managing ad campaigns on Twitter was a labour intensive process — a process that couldn’t scale to meet the requirements of agencies and big brands. Consider an agency creating thousands of new ad units for their clients every day. These ads had to be manually uploaded, one by one. Editing these ad units, if you had to, was equally painful.

Running scheduled ad campaigns? Forget about it!

By tapping into the goodness of third-party tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, GraphEffect from SHIFT and TBG Digital’s One Media Manager (and likely many more in the very near future), advertisers can now upload and edit bulk ads, and effortlessly create, plan and run ad campaigns like they do for Facebook or YouTube.

Reporting and analytics just got better

Twitter’s native ad analytics and reporting tools are, well, threadbare. Here’s a look at the entire repertoire of Twitter’s analytics for promoted tweets, trends and accounts.
Twitter doesn’t offer much apart from pretty basic metrics such as impressions, retweets, clicks, replies, and follows. Hardly enough to wet the lips of advertisers spending $200,000 per day on a promoted trend (yes, they’ve upped the price from the $80,000 they used to charge when it first launched).

Adding context to these metrics and enriching them with perspective that you glean from cross-channel ad campaigns is something that Facebook, LinkedIn and now, Twitter’s partner ecosystem is more than capable of delivering on.

You can squeeze more bang-for-your-buck with hyper targeting

Twitter barely offers anything in terms of targeting.

Since launching their promoted products suite, Twitter has offered businesses the ability to target by geography, by gender and only recently, by interest. There already is an impressive ecosystem of vendors that do some pretty neat stuff around generating in-depth audience profiles, like being able to suggest and rank individuals according to topic specific influence levels, or giving you a list of users similar to your target audience. As Twitter expands their Ads API partner ecosystem, marketing software vendors with a strong focus on analytics will be able to give marketers the ability to run highly targeted and highly contextual ad campaigns.

Want to run a promoted tweet campaign to get the attention of influential folks in technology, living in Palo Alto, and are unsatisfied Verizon customers? No problem!

You can finally expect data-driven real-time ad campaign optimization

The industry for tapping into the social web, mining for relevant conversations, and optimizing engagement is awash with hundreds of vendors catering to a wide array of requirements. In the process of adopting an ‘always-on’ approach in monitoring for trends or impending crises that could snowball into something disastrous, they generate a lot of real-time or near real-time insights. These insights can now be used to complete the feedback loop in optimizing ad campaigns at run time.

And maybe, just maybe …

Right now, the only engagement metrics on Twitter that are indicative of the success or failure of an ad campaign are retweets, @mentions and replies. You really can’t measure much else with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. However, Twitter is looking into newer ad units, giving advertisers more options to engage with their target audience.

The ad unit that Twitter is currently testing features an image with a ‘Get it Now’ button (see image below), giving marketers the ability to generate leads directly from Tweets. You can also expect Vine lending itself as a new, meaningful ad unit. 6 second videos on autoplay could very well be Twitter’s equivalent to Facebook’s rumoured autoplay video ads.

Whether or not Twitter chooses to roll out lead cards, it isn’t outlandish to suggest that Twitter will be rolling out newer, more complex ad units in the near future, enabling their partner ecosystem to deliver algorithmic, analytics- intensive, data-driven technology solutions so advertisers can increase the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns.

Folks, Twitter marketing just got serious.

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii, an interactive web-based platform for business software selection. In his previous role as an enterprise software analyst at Ovum, Bala evaluated over a hundred enterprise technologies in depth and authored reports that helped businesses mitigate technology adoption related challenges. He also undertook a number of consulting engagements, advising companies ranging from garage startups to global multi-billion dollar firms. Bala is a graduate in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, where he focused on Internet Governance and Policy related issues.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Tweet bird

Twitter announced its new Ads API this morning, along with the first five partners who will be integrating it into their social media management tools. Essentially, agencies and enterprises who already use management tools like HootSuite and advertising tools like Adobe’s Media Optimizer can now buy and run ads right within those environments.

The first five partners are Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TBG Digital. SHIFT produces GraphEffect, a social advertising solution, and TBG Digital is social media advertising agency.

“What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies,” Twitter’s April Underwood wrote in a blog post.

More on HootSuite’s new Twitter ad tools here …

In a smart move for Twitter, while the partners will provide their clients the ability to advertise on Twitter from within their tools, when those clients become Twitter advertisers, they will be Twitter’s clients, not HootSuite’s, or Adobe’s, or SHIFT’s. In other words, the ad-buying arrangement is consummated via the Twitter API, and the contractual agreement is with Twitter itself.

“We’re setting the accounts up with Twitter,” HootSuite’s Ryan Holmes told me this morning by phone. “The validation is done on Twitter’s side.”

While Adobe, SHIFT, and TBG are ad agencies and marketplaces, and HootSuite is a social media management tool, one of the really interesting partners is Salesforce, which is again adding to its toolbox in a quest to offer everything any company needs for any purpose, within its cloud. The company is announcing a new Social Ads Platform for Twitter today, which will be part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and likens Twitter’s move to the launch of Facebook’s app platform in 2007.

That might be a bridge too far, but it is a really pivotal move in Twitter’s evolution.

Which is ongoing, as Twitter’s Underwood wrote:

The Twitter Certified Products Program is also evolving to include ads products. In the coming months, we’ll begin to certify ads products that integrate with the Twitter Ads API and consistently improve marketing efficiency and ROI.

This is just the start of our efforts that will give advertisers more choice — and for our partners who are ad tool providers, the Ads API represents a new way for their expertise to meet the needs of their clients.

photo credit: x-ray delta one via photopin cc

Twitter has added localized trends for 100 new cities, improving its capability to show people the buzziest news and hashtags being discussed on the information network in locations around the world. The new cities include Istanbul, Frankfurt, Guadalajara, Mexico, and Incheon, South Korea.

“With this update, we now surface the ‘most breaking’ news in more than 200 locations,” Twitter engineer Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis wrote in a blog post.

Trends, formerly called “trending topics,” has changed in significance and purpose over the years. Today, the trends list factors less into the overall information network experience, but it still serves as an interesting indicator of what people are talking globally or more close to home.

The addition of trends in 100 more cities may also bring in a bit more dough. With Twitter’s Promoted Trends product, companies and marketers can pay to sponsor a term or hashtag and get it atop the Trends list. One hundred more cities means one hundred more markets where Twitter can sell these units and appeal to local advertisers who want to reach city-specific audiences.

Photo credit: Ilse, Flickr

The Twitter mobile experience is getting infinitely noisier today. The information network is in the process of pumping up the volume on the amount of mobile advertising content it shows to users.

Twitter is adding Promoted Tweets, ads that double as tweets, to the mobile timeline inside Twitter’s iPhone and Android apps. Promoted Accounts, or the Twitter accounts that brands commission for additional exposure, are already being featured in both of the apps’ “Who to Follow” recommendation list.

And there’s a fun bonus that Twitter thinks you’ll go nuts for. “Initially, a small number of users may see Promoted Tweets near the top of their timelines from brands they already follow,” the company said Tuesday in an announcement. “This will help ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about.”

Altogether, the mobile app experience, Twitter said, is now on par with what users already find on the web.

“Promoted Tweets will appear in your timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once; as you scroll, the Promoted Tweet will flow with the rest of the Tweets in your timeline,” the company explained.

Unsightly though the new ads may be for some users, the addition makes (dollars and) sense. A small majority, or 55 percent, of Twitter’s monthly active users access the information network via mobile device, meaning mobile is where the most money is to be made.

In fact, the proactive move makes mobile less of a risk for Twitter than it is has become for Facebook — unless you consider the potential to annoy people a risk.

Photo credit: info grrl/Flickr

These figures come from eMarketer, a digital intelligence firm that keeps a close eye on ad revenues for companies like Twitter and Facebook.

Last year was Twitter’s first full year of selling advertising products. In 2011, however, Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts (as the company calls its various ad products) really started ramping up. Earlier this month, the company started serving promotional content in a new way altogether, allowing advertisers to push tweets to users even if those users don’t follow the advertiser’s account.

Another new source of revenue for the end of 2011 and the duration of 2012 will be political advertising. The company opened a Washington, DC-based ad sales office to gear up for a slew of political advertising over the next 13 months or so.

While Twitter has played an important and growing role in politics since its use by the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, this marks the first time the platform will be used for traditional, disclosure-tagged political ads.

eMarketer estimates that by 2013, Twitter’s ad revenue shall have grown to around $400 million annually. Not bad for a startup that famously didn’t have a business model just two years ago.

This month, the company also announced that ad targeting options would be coming up soon. These would allow marketers and brands to target consumers by location and other criteria.

Already, Twitter’s unique approach to ads is creating stellar engagement rates for brands. The company doesn’t even call its promoted content advertising, in fact, because it insists that even brand-related messages are and should be indistinguishable from “normal” tweets and trends on Twitter.

“Marketers have seen solid engagement rates with Twitter advertising — in some cases better than those on Facebook — despite Twitter’s relatively smaller audience,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo confirmed this at a meeting three weeks ago, saying, “We continue to see great engagement rates … The health of the business is great.”

Costolo noted that one major advertiser, Virgin, had its fifth largest sales day ever due to a Twitter campaign. Most advertisers see an engagement rate of between 3 and 5 percent, and 80 percent of advertisers run more than one campaign.

Twitter’s rising valuation

As the company’s business model has emerged and begun to show early signs of success, its valuation has grown.

In April 2008, the company was worth less than $150 million and actually closer to $80 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s then-latest round of funding.

But by the following year, the company’s valuation had already skyrocketed to $1 billion. Another round late in 2010 put Twitter’s worth at $3.7 billion, with another February 2011 investment pegging it at more than $4 billion.

While speculation was running rampant that some investors valued the company at around $10 billion toward the end of 2010, a confirmed funding round last month left Twitter valued at $8.4 billion.

While $8.4 billion seems like a significant jump from $4 billion a few months before, VC firms aren’t the only ones who’ve pegged Twitter’s valuation in that neighborhood. Recent private stock trading on sites such as SharesPost has seen prices ranging between $34.50 and $31, which values the company at $6.8 billion to $7.7 billion on the private market.

The company’s “Promoted Trends” cost is currently $120,000 per day for advertisers, which is up significantly from the $25,000 to $30,000 it charged in April 2010, said Twitter’s director of revenue Adam Bain in a recent interview with ClickZ.

Twitter’s “Promoted Accounts” and “Promoted Tweets” offerings are auction-based, but require advertisers to spend a minimum of $15,000 over three months, according to Bain, who also stated that these efforts are handled by the company’s sales and marketing staff of over 60 people.

Some have criticized the high-dollar barrier to entry Twitter has created for its unconventional advertising, but it hasn’t stopped clients like HBO, Samsung, Toyota and many others from doing business with the social network. To date, Twitter has worked with 600 advertisers on 6,000 campaigns since it began in April 2010.

Also, such criticism fails to take into account the type of advertising clients Twitter want to attract. Unlike search engine marketing, those who advertise their message with Twitter have a better chance of creating a long-term relationship with consumers. Twitter promotions are also more widely viewed across its entire network, making it highly effective for clients that want to reach as many people as possible.

For the right kind of client, Twitter’s “Promoted” ad products can be a highly successful return on investment. However, the amount of revenue generated by in-house sales and marketing is a drop in the bucket compared to a self-serve advertising platform.

AllThingsDigital’s Kara Swisher reports that Twitter just raised a $200 million round that valued the company at $3.7 billion.

In a company blog post, CEO Dick Costolo confirmed that the company has raised a new round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investors. (Kleiner partner John Doerr recently said that his firm was wrong to turn Twitter down in its early days). And Twitter has two new board members — Mike McCue, former CEO of Microsoft-acquired TellMe and currently CEO of Flipboard, and David Rosenblatt, former CEO of Google-acquired DoubleClick. (The post doesn’t mention funding amount or valuation.)

Earlier speculation has placed Twitter’s new valuation at $3 billion, which led VentureBeat’s executive editor Owen Thomas to ask (since it’s all speculative math), “Why not $10 billion?“

Costolo titled his post “Meaningful Growth”, and he starts off with a list of numbers showing Twitter’s growth for 2010: 25 billion tweets, 100 million new registered accounts, and growth from 130 to more than 350 employees.

What’s missing is any mention of revenue. It has only been a few months since Costolo declared that Twitter has “cracked the code” on advertising, and co-founder Ev Williams said more recently that the company is still exploring business models.

Earlier today, the company declared, “It’s Business Time” and unveiled an upgraded website at business.twitter.com, including pages highlighting its advertising products (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts). But even then, each product is described as “in beta with a small selection of advertisers.” If you want, you can fill out a form — not to place ads, but so Twitter can notify you when the company is finally ready to accept your money.

It sounds like the feature will work the way All Things Digital reported last week. Promoted Accounts take advantage of the recently-added “who to follow” box, where Twitter suggests popular users who seem similar to the accounts you’re already following. Promoted Accounts will show up in the same box, and even though Twitter is getting paid to feature them, the company says it will still try to keep the suggestions relevant.

For example, if Microsoft wants to promote the Xbox Twitter account, Twitter says it would only show that promotion to users who follow other video game-related accounts.

Twitter announced that it’s also increasing the visibility of its advertising products. It’s moving Promoted Trends, where advertisers can pay to feature a topic in the “trending topics” box, from the bottom of the box to the top, supposedly because, “We’ve been pleased with the quality of Promoted Trends and people are finding them useful.” And it’s making both Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets available to outside applications, starting with HootSuite, so that they’re visible to the broader audience of Twitter users, not just those who visit the main website.

Twitter says it’s working with more than 40 advertisers and that nearly 80 percent of companies that have bought ads are returning to buy more ads after their initial campaign.