Twitter’s New Quick Promote Feature Aimed At SMBs

Twitter has been putting a lot of focus lately on expanding its Promoted Tweets service and monetizing its ad platform. We recently wrote about the company’s announcement that Promoted Tweets will start running on third-party websites and apps. Now, the social media company has made another move with the introduction of a feature aimed at SMBs.

Twitter’s new “quick promote” feature will allow SMBs to select their most popular Tweets and boost them directly from their analytics dashboard. Up until now, the main option available to SMBs has been through Twitter’s self-service platform. Although this service will continue to be available, by targeting SMBs on the analytics page, the company will be providing an ad service closer to where those businesses spend the majority of their time.

“Starting today, you can use quick promote to amplify your best performing Tweets directly from the Tweet activity dashboard,” wrote Twitter in its blog post. “Promoting a Tweet takes just a few clicks and your Tweet will automatically be targeted to users who have interests similar to your followers – the audience that is most likely to be interested in your message.”

This new feature is a sign of Twitter’s continuing attempts to successfully monetize its analytics platform. Although Twitter has made a big push in building up its position with larger advertisers, today’s announcement is clearly aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. The company hasn’t provided any specifics about how many SMBs use its platform, but the blog post does offer some data about the success rate of growing SMB revenues through Promoted Tweets. “We found that users who see a relevant Promoted Tweet from an SMB are also 32 percent more likely to visit that business,” wrote Twitter.

The new “quick promote” feature allows SMBs to add in features such as action buttons to download content, however, it does not allow them to add targeting to specify mobile or web users. Instead, this will be determined by Twitter, based on the content of the Tweet and the budget that is set by the business.

The fact that this new feature can be managed from the analytics dashboard should appeal to a wide range of SMBs, and Twitter provided the following explanation of the simple “quick promote” process.

1. Select a Tweet to promote. We recommend you choose a Tweet that’s already resonating with your followers. You can tell that a Tweet is resonating if it has a high number of total impressions and engagement rate.
2. Choose a budget. We’ll provide an estimate of the reach you’ll see after promoting your Tweet. If you haven’t yet signed up for Twitter ads, follow the prompt in the Tweet activity dashboard to set up your account.
3. Watch people engage with your Tweet in real time, and optimize your content strategy to drive more of your desired actions, like Retweets or URL clicks.