While Facebook have been prospering thanks to their innovative and easy-to-implement advertising platform (set to overtake Yahoo.com in advertising revenues according to recent reports) the other big player in social media, Twitter, has been slower to develop their advertising offering. Much of the reason behind this is to do with the functionality and interface of Twitter and the fact that many Twitter users actually access the platform via third party applications (like TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic) on their computers or mobile phones, making for an uncontrolled environment unsuitable for advertising.
To date, Twitter have introduced Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts but take-up of these products has been largely confined to big organisations since Twitter only allows companies with large budgets to advertise on the platform. All this is set to change however as Twitter are rumoured to be rolling out a new self-service advertising interface for small-to-medium businessnes. The service is currently in beta testing with a number of businesses with no official announcements from Twitter HQ as to when it will be rolled out to the wider public.
Twitter is currently being valued at anything from $4 – 8 billion US and is seeking investors to help it keep pace with its growing audience. When they come on board no doubt these same investors will want to see a plan towards growing advertising revenue and that means reaching out to a larger market of advertisers in the small to medium sized arena. If Twitter can come up with a model as successful as their rivals in Facebook it will be happy days both for the micro-blogging site and for small businesses eager to take advantage of marketing opportunities in social media.