Twitter is beefing up its year-old app install ad business

Twitter is ramping up its mobile app install advertising efforts, one year after launching the business.

Twitter is testing new features that will let app makers use videos to promote their apps on its service, and it plans to broaden the reach for the ads, which have proven particularly popular among the new crop of Internet start-ups eager to stand out from the crowd.

The new advertising features come as Twitter is facing pressure from Wall Street over its disappointing financial performance and user growth. Earlier this month CEO Dick Costolo stepped down and co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as interim CEO.

App install ads could help Twitter generate more revenue.

App install ads are online ads that make it easy for consumers to download new mobile apps to their smartphones or tablets. The ads provide an effective way for Internet startups to quickly amass users for their apps by reaching the vast audiences on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook pioneered the app install ad in 2012, and Twitter followed suit. Twitter said the ads have help companies like delivery service Postmates, which it said doubled the number of installations of its app that occurred on Twitter quarter-over-quarter by running a mobile app promotion campaign.

Marketers will now be able to promote their apps using auto-play videos, which provides a more compelling experience than a still image. That should improve the ads' performance, and boost the number of users who proceed to download the promoted app, Twitter online sales executive Richard Alfonsi told Business Insider.

Twitter said the app install ads will now be viewable by a much larger audience. Instead of only being viewable by the roughly 300 million users who log on to Twitter's service every month, the ads will now be displayed across Twitter's network of partner apps. That means the ads will be viewable on more than 1 billion mobile devices.