13 Mar Twitter Launches API But Don’t Expect To Get Your Hands On It, Yet
On February 20, 2013, Twitter announced that it would be launching the Twitter ads API, only the third social media juggernaut to do so behind Facebook and LinkedIn. With this announcement being one the “biggest social media launches in a year,” according to Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers across the country jumped for joy… sort of.
Since launching Promoted Tweets (organic tweets that see a large amount of engagement, usually based on retweets, @replies and favoriting, that are then promoted to a larger demographic audience) in April 2010, marketers have been able to reach audiences upward of 200 million active users to promote their respective brands. However, where marketers have in the past been able to access their campaigns from one easy to use dashboard for sites such as Google or Facebook, they have had to manually dive in to the twitterverse to update and put in each tweet, in each various language and to each specific demographic for every single campaign they were running. With the new Twitter ad API, marketers will now be able to have the same streamlined effect that they have had on other social channels such as Facebook to run all of their Twitter campaigns simultaneously, making it easier to target their audience as well as making it easier to read the results of how campaigns are doing.
Yet this will prove to be a slow roll out, as Twitter is currently only partnering with five other companies (Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, Shift and TBG Digital) and shows no real signs of speeding up anytime soon.
Many speculate that the full launch will be within the next 6 months, but it could potentially be longer. With this new streamlined effect, many have raised concerns about whether or not users will see a flood of advertisements on their Twitter timeline. Twitter’s product manager for revenue April Underwood says that will not be the case, as the ads API is only focused on making it easier for the marketers, and that like in the past, ads will be rewarded on quality and not quantity.
With the announcement still fresh on people’s minds, the launch of the Twitter ads API has the social marketing community filled with excitement but only time will tell the full extent of how the system will affect marketers and users alike.
