Twitter Rolls out "Good AdWords" like Program for Small Businesses

Twitter is in the process of rolling new ad programs for small business. In a nutshell, this offer would include promoted accounts and promoted tweets. Like Google’s Ad-words, Twitter’s promoted tweets would require merchants to bid on the term(s) of interest. Depending on ranking, these tweets will then appear on twitter's Frontpage, where is visible to a large audience. The promoted accounts will give the audience the option to follow the merchants for the future products and services.

Since this offering is still at its beta stage, its success has yet to be seen. But, I think that this program will be very like to be successful for two following reasons,

1. From the merchant’s perspective, the twitter ad program will work like Google’s Adwords, where the merchant will pay only when the audience is engaged, i.e. audience has to click on the twit to be re-directed to a separate webpage. So, such offering will allow the merchants to come up with a more successful campaign with less money.
2. From the customer point of view, the new offering from the local merchant could be mean new/interesting items, discounts/coupons, or other special offers.

Well, having said that, I think the offering should include the following things (at least, article was not very clear about), which can improve the offering even more.

1. The offer should give the merchant the option to lunch the ad campaign that is targeting to the audience from certain location.
2. The promoted accounts should give the merchant a separate database, which contains contact information of subscribers so that the merchant can market them in the future.

Overall, it’s great to see that twitter is taking a step forward in the e-commerce’s scene. With the improvements discussed, I think it will become an intriguing offer that both merchants and customers cannot refuse.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/09/22/twitter-ads-small-business/