New Twitter Advertising API To Make Life Easier For Marketers

Twitter API aims to generate revenue ahead of possible IPO

Twitter has launched a new advertising API that should make it easier to market services on the micro-blogging platform.

The new API will automate the purchase of adverts and allow advertisers to integrate them with campaigns on other sites, such as Facebook, by using third parties.

Marketers had been frustrated at the need to manually enter details, such as the amount of money they wanted to spend and the demographics they wanted to reach, every time they launched a campaign.

Twitter hopes the changes to its advertising platform will alleviate these grievances and allow it to generate more revenue ahead of a possible initial public offering. It is believed that Twitter could earn as much as £6.8 billion from an IPO, which could happen next year.

Twitter advertising API

Girl on Twitter Bird © FotoliaHowever, the company has recognised it has to perform a balancing act between appeasing marketers and ensuring users are not annoyed.

“As interest in Twitter has grown, our focus has been on delivering better ads for users, not more ads,” said Twitter in a blog post. “We believe our system is working well because users like the ads experience on Twitter. Our system rewards marketers for being good, not for being loud. And this approach encourages ads that are engaging, relevant and useful.”

“Towards this goal, we’re always working on ways to make it easier to manage campaigns and get more value out of advertising with us.

“One important step is to enable a diverse group of companies that can integrate seamlessly with our ads platform. We think it will give you a fuller set of options to manage advertising on Twitter.”

Twitter has been testing the new platform with its partners since January, and will apply to promoted tweets and promoted accounts. The first five partners are Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital, who will start offering Twitter advertising features to a limited number of their clients. Other companies have been invited to join the partner programme.

“With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale,” said Twitter.

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