Last week we attended Twitter’s Twitter4Brands conference – an annual event showcasing some of the latest developments by the platform and some innovative or standout case studies.

The big news from a product perspective is real-time keyword targeting. This new (paid) functionality allows marketers to potentially put their tweet in front of anyone discussing a problem to which their product or service might offer the solution, or even ‘double target’ by highlighting those watching a TV show where a TVC has been aired, then following up with a tweet to hammer the point home. Read More »

The Associated Press last night stirred up a small storm on Twitter as it announced that it will begin to run sponsored Tweets in the timeline of its main @AP Twitter account and signed Samsung as its first sponsor. The story has raised concerns among some journalists as to whether this would damage AP’s credibility as a news organisation. Some have gone as as far to say they were unfollowing AP, that it shouldn’t do it and that it devalues the brand (check out the Storify reaction below).

What these aren’t are official Promoted Tweets from Twitter, but rather promotional messages sent out as Tweets on @AP. Initially it plans to send out two a day this week timed with the 2013 International CES – the consumer electronics show — in Las Vegas. Hardly a huge deal. Read More »

Yesterday Twitter announced that is will be giving $100 in free credits to the first 10,000 American small businesses that apply and are eligible. When they ran a similar scheme with American Express back in February, they brought thousands of news businesses into their advertising products.

In a blog post, Twitter said that the successful applicants could use the credit to purchase Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts services to help boost their online following:

“With Promoted Tweets, small businesses can extend the reach of their Tweets to a broader audience…Promoted Accounts can also speed up the growth of a loyal follower base for a small business.”

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Twitter has released some data that provides interesting statistics that give an idea of the kind of performance Promoted Tweets are achieving for advertisers.

Most notably though is how mobile is performing. In one campaign for Volkswagen the best performing Promoted Tweet on mobile received 43.8% engagement.

While a campaign for LG saw a Promoted trend achieve an average engagement rate of 38%. Read More »

Back in July Twitter introduced new targeting capabilities for Promoted Tweets that allow advertisers to target ads at users in a particular region rather than sending a blanket message to all followers regardless of where they’re located in the world.

Last night while the world went nuts for the iPhone 5, Twitter unveiled enhancements to its geo-targeting capabilities for Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts that allows marketers in the UK and Japan to target specific regions for the first time. Read More »

It was always going to be big and it was. President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech last night at the #DNC2012 set a new record for political moments on Twitter, with 52,756 Tweets per minute, as he pressed his message of taking America forward.

Earlier this week at the Democratic National Convention Michelle Obama beat Mitt Romney as she gave her speech. The First Lady hit 28,003 Tweets per minute and the President almost doubled that. He left the peak of 14,289 TPM that Romney hit in the shade.

The Democrats, neck and neck in the polls with the Republicans, have shown they can dominate the conversation on Twitter and now, with the two conventions behind us, the online battle is about to step up a gear. Read More »

Twitter is to introduce the ability for advertisers to target users with promoted tweets based on their interests or indications of what they like.

It brings a much needed degree of flexibility and additional sophistication to what advertisers are able to do on Twitter and should make it an increasingly attractive proposition to those who have so far only dipped their toe in where Promoted products are concerned.

Some of the first big users of the new feature could be the Republican and Democratic parties as they fight it out in the run up to the November election.

Read More »

Twitter has introduced new targeting capabilities for Promoted Tweets that allow advertisers to target ads at users in a particular region rather than sending a blanket message to all followers regardless of where they’re located.

It means advertisers can make relevant local offers to customers for the first time, which is something that has been lacking from Twitter’s Promoted Tweets ad programme since it first launched.

Until now it hasn’t been possible to target Twitter users only in the UK without hitting users in the rest of the world at the same time. Read More »

A report in the Wall Street Journal that says on most days “Twitter is now generating the majority of its revenue from ads shown to its users on mobile” rather than from ads on its Twitter.com website.

That is particularly good news for Twitter as cracking the mobile platform in terms of advertising is going to be increasingly important for any social network as Facebook has found to its cost. Read More »

As Twitter today celebrated its first birthday in the UK today, Brand Republic held a lunch time chat with Twitter’s head of sales Bruce Daisley.

We spoke to Daisley about Twitter advertising, some of the brands who are doing it well and why Twitter is a very different platform for advertisers compared to Facebook. Read More »