More than 75 per cent of advertisers today use a social media platform to get their message out. The good news for sites such as Twitter is that the social media advertising spend is expected to increase substantially in the coming years.
Two recent studies, one from BIA/Kelsey and the other from eMarketer peg the social advertising spend to reach close to $10 billion by 2016 alone, and two-thirds of marketing executives are ramping up their budget for social advertising in 2013.
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This trend is one of the factors for why Twitter formed a partnership with Salesforce.com. The social media site hopes to better optimize its Ads API platforms through Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud. This initiative is expected to help marketing professionals from the high tech vendor community, advertising agencies, solution providers with channel marketing funds as well as small-to-medium-size businesses in Canada and the rest of the world to manage Twitter Ads at scale alongside all other social marketing programs.
According to Twitter, marketers will have the ability to work with an initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns and be able to integrate them into existing cross-channel advertising strategies.
Besides Salesforce.com, Twitter also partnered with Vancouver’s HootSuite for new promoted products integration, Adobe Systems, Shift and TBG Digital.
Renny Monaghan, CMO of Salesforce.com Canada said Salesforce.com is an enterprise computing company that along with Twitter and this initiative will be helping customer and SMBs connect with existing and potential new customers like never before. “This will give them a social, mobile and cloud technology to get to market faster and sell more effectively. This will further expand the customer engagement model across all touch points from brand awareness to buying a second and third product and it’s all unified,” Monaghan said.
For example, the Ford Motor Co., a Salesforce.com customer, uses the company’s Marketing Cloud to properly measure social media responses on its latest product the Ford Explorer. Monaghan said the Ford Explorer was launched on social media and the automaker was able to listen and view the entire stream of social media activity to find out what sentiment was out there for the vehicle and who are the car’s true advocates. “This allowed Ford to measure it and on the flip side drive results across Owned, Earned and Paid social media channels,” he added.
For the channel, Monaghan sees solution providers leveraging manufacturers for social media content and vice versa to create a seamless experience with the end customer.
In a prepared statement Adam Bain, Twitter’s President of Global Revenue said the company believes developers and partners are an important extension of Twitter’s products and it’s thrilled to give them the tools to manage and create Twitter Ad campaigns through existing in-house solutions.
Twitter added that this initiative will give users the ability to see the most relevant promoted Tweets from advertisers. 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.
Twitter also enhanced its Twitter Certified Products Program to include ads products. In the coming months, Twitter will begin to certify ads products that integrate with the Twitter Ads APIs.
