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Twitter is wooing small brands with a subscription ads product that automatically runs ads for them, but it may not be the best short-term strategy
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Twitter is wooing small brands with a subscription ads product that automatically runs ads for them, but it may not be the best short-term strategy

Jack Dorsey

Associated Press

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

  • Twitter has rolled out a subscription ads product that helps small brands automatically grow their follower base and amplifies their tweets to reach more people
  • Promote Mode is available for a flat fee of $99 a month
  • But it may not be the bets short-term strategy, as Snap's dilution of ad prices in its third quarter showed.

If you're a small business, you don't have to run your own ads on Twitter anymore. Starting on Wednesday, you can pay Twitter $99 a month and the company will do it all for you.

Twitter has rolled out Promote Mode, its first subscription ads product that helps small brands and businesses automatically grow their follower base and amplifies their tweets to reach more people - saving businesses the effort of creating ads and managing their own ad campaigns on Twitter's social network.

Advertisers who opt in will have their tweets and profiles automatically promoted on Twitter, boosting their reach and followers for a flat fee of $99 per month. Any regular tweets such as updates about the business, brand or content will automatically reach its target audience.

The mode builds on Twitter's existing self-serve platform, making it even easier for small businesses to promote themselves. Instead of having someone go in and set up an ad campaign, a brand can let Promote Mode do all the work, making it super easy for businesses who may not have the time or expertise to set up the campaign.

"We've heard again and again that oftentimes the marketer simply doesn't have the time or extra hands to create, manage and optimize ad campaigns," Wook Chung, Twitter's director of product management, told Business Insider. "One of our first prompts for Twitter Promote Mode was, 'How can we save people time?' Through this new offering, we are aiming to help them achieve their objectives in a more simplified way."

Building a balanced ad business

As Twitter and Snapchat attempt to scale up their ads businesses, they are focusing on increasingly incentivizing small brands. But its not a strategy that always works, at least in the short-term, as Snapchat's third quarter earnings showed yesterday.

Snapchat has introduced a self-serve ad buying platform as well as a new creative tool called Snapchat Publisher in recent months, but that caused its ad prices to plummet by 60% year over year. Snapchat executives attributed that to more advertisers buying ads using programmatic, self-serve tools on the platform which may be a good thing in the long run, but diluted pricing in the short-term.

Still, the small business market is important to the success of ad partners, as Google and Facebook and Facebook have shown, said Sherwin Su, director of social media activation at Essence. And of course, it gets a chance to pocket $99 per subscriber.

"As with any business strategy, there needs to be a balance of the short and long-term, but there's no debate that the small business market is important," he said. "At the end of the day, if Twitter and Snap do not start building products and stronger relationships with small brands now, they'll have to do this eventually given the opportunity."

What's most important, he added, is how Snap and Twitter eventually utilize their learnings to continue to innovate.

"They need to enhance products and achieve the right balance in user experience, self-serve demand, pricing and delivering results."