Every year, there’s a development in the social marketing world that really matters. A development that so important that it makes our senses to focus, pay attention and figure out how to take advantage of it.
One of the major change in social media marketing was in 2007, when Facebook launched its application development platform, allowing marketers to connect with customers in a whole new way. Many big names like Starbucks, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Ford join in the campaign and are now the leaders in all social marketing.
Several days ago, Twitter announced that it would finally allow marketers to advertise at scale using powerful third-party buying and optimization systems. This will be different from the old days where all ads were managed manually on Twitter. This new thing will make the changes easier, but making them in a timely manner across all your campaigns were a labor-intensive effort.
With the announcement, Twitter joins Facebook and LinkedIn as the only other global social networks with advertising APIs that allow marketers to create, manage and optimize ads. It was expected that other giants like Google+ and Pinterest will release the same offerings soon.
For the first time, marketers can now manage Twitter ads from the same systems used to manage social listening, social content and social ads for other networks. Like a Sponsored Story on Facebook, they can now monitor engaging tweets and turn them into Promoted Tweets, further shattering the silos between paid, owned and earned media.
The initial launch is specifically for Twitter’s Promoted Products offerings, including Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. Twitter will continue to exclusively sell and manage its Promoted Trend offering.
Twitter’s ad API is a natural progression for the company. Nonetheless, this is a game changer for brands who need the power to pull off real-time engagement that turns tweets and posts into memorable content.
Today’s launch reminds me of the early Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Program. You’re going to see an explosion of products that let marketers tap into consumer insights and turn them into content and, ultimately, ads. An ecosystem of products that do more than just let consumers and businesses post to Twitter.
Facebook proved that the social platform monetization and user engagement are not mutually exclusive. Twitter was also expected to be just as successful as they provide marketers one of the world’s largest real-time canvases to play with.
These powerful API creates the mutual situations for everyone. Facebook and Twitter benefit by outsourcing much of their product development in this area to experts focused exclusively on building these products. Marketers benefit by using the technology to be more efficient and drive more ROI. Most importantly, by promoting content on Twitter and Facebook that your users are actually engaging with the most, the users of these important platforms get less crappy ads than pretty much every other major web destination.
So now what?
The leaders in this next wave of cross-platform social marketing will dive in immediately. There’s no better time than today to get serious about social media marketing since Twitter has now increased the stakes and made it easier for you to play your winning hand.
Just look no further than Facebook to see why methodical, always-on, programmatic buying will outperform, by a long shot, those still managing their content and ad programs manually.
As every brand flocks to Twitter, and the war for quality inventory heats up, expect mobile to be the primary battleground.
Twitter recently released a study on its mobile users, and found that 96% are more likely to follow 11 or more brands, significantly more than the five brands that the average Twitter user follows. Mobile users are also 58% more likely to recall seeing an ad on Twitter than the average user.
This makes sense. Twitter is a mobile-first platform, and this is where you should start your promotional campaign.