New Twitter Ad API: Bring on the Campaigns, and the Doozies

In the gold rush to harvest marketing dollars and user information, Twitter has finally taken the next step to monetizing their service by building out an ad API to allow marketers to purchase ads through their already existing dashboards.

To the consumer, this doesn’t mean much, but to marketers—Twitter just got a lot juicier.

More Campaigns, Better Engagement and Stronger Targeting

No longer limited by running a single ad at a time, marketers can now roll out, manage and track multiple Twitter campaigns successfully. The APIs also enable brands to use those dashboard tools to listen and engage more accurately, both improving the user and advertiser experience.

Outlined in AdWeek, Michael Lazerow, chief marketing officer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud explains.

"Because we have a robust listening solution and engagement solution, we can listen to what people are saying [on Twitter about a brand] and engage with them and take any of their tweets and promote them.”

Needless to say, this thirty party sponsorship could take some getting used to from the user end, but in reality it is no different than getting a power retweet.

So say a user tweets about in an Oreo they prefer the cookie to the frosting. Using your dashboard you pick up the mention and can either engage them with others who side the same, or more interestingly argue the opposite. Once you get them in the same thread together you can let the sparks fly and sponsor the genuine adverts that come up in conversation.

Where It Can Go Wrong

While post sponsoring is very much about timing and spontaneity, brands should be wary that sponsoring a tweet carries the weight of the brand just like an advertisement. Whereas it used to take days or even weeks to get a print ad approved it now takes the click of a button to sponsor a customer’s thoughts. And with targeted marketing getting better and better, customers have a low tolerance for mismatched adverts or poorly put together ideas.

Take for example this post sponsored by Miracle Whip under #SEO, a hashtag typically used by people with e-marketing and development backgrounds. A properly thought up campaign would be use hashtag #mayonnaise, #sandwich or #tuna and leave the #SEO for businesses such as SEOMoz, Screaming Frog or other similar focuses. Instead Miracle Whip has blindly hopped on a keyword that gets a lot of results and they end up looking out of place.

While it can be easily corrected by deletion, you could have thousands of impressions in just a few seconds—not to mention the few that are likely to take screenshots. This can leave your brand looking, to say the least, open mouthed and foolish.

Can you think of other poorly done examples? Is your brand sponsoring tweets? How successful have the results been? I’d love to hear your comments below.