Twitter Launches New Advertising Tool for Small Businesses

Twitter is making it easier than ever for small businesses to advertise on its platform. The company introduced quick promote Wednesday, a new advertising feature that allows businesses to promote tweets directly from their analytics dashboard.

Promoted tweets, which are normal tweets advertisers pay Twitter to share with a broader audience, have been around for some time but quick promote is meant to make the process simpler to encourage small companies to pay for the advertising service.

"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." Twitter's Buster Benson writes on Twitter's small business blog.

Here's how it works: Businesses choose a tweet from their analytics dashboard — Twitter recommends using a tweet that already has high engagement— and select "promote this tweet to drive engagements." From there, they can set a budget based on how many people they want to engage with the tweet.

Twitter will then automatically target it to users with similar interests. On its part, the social network says users who see promoted tweets on their timelines are 32% more likely to engage with that company.

As Twitter looks to stem its slowing user growth and please investors, the company has been experimenting with ways to attract new users, including a new Instant Timeline feature. The update closely follows news Twitter will begin surfacing promoted tweets to the Flipboard app and Yahoo Japan website, a move that appeared to appeal to investors [Mashable].