Back in August, Twitter announced some big changes to its Platform with its new API 1.1 and display requirements. Using some basic guidelines to segment which 3rd party services may or may not fit into the future of Twitter’s app ecosystem, some surmised that they were planning to shrink their vibrant developer community.
Not so. Get ready for things to blow up big time now that Twitter is swinging for the fences and releasing a fresh Ads API that could be a win-win-win for users, 3rd parties, and
Twitter itself.
Wait, Twitter Has Ads?
If you’ve asked yourself that question as a consumer, then Twitter is doing something very right. Promoted Tweets , Accounts , and Trends all provide targeted inline boosting of Twitter’s core elements, with clear visibility of their “promoted” status. 
Previously available only via native and manual ad services, Twitter has recognized a big opportunity to build out its Ad Products offering, with the goal of “delivering better ads for users, not more ads”. World-class ad targeting and analytics services are already prevalent and offer deep integration with a range of well-known ad platforms provided by Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Adding a Twitter Ads API (currently covering just Promoted Tweets and Accounts) makes perfect sense to leverage marketers’ ever growing need for cross-platform coordination within a single, aggregated 3rd party service. This cross-platform paradigm allows you to combine everything you know about your audience and messaging from the rest of your ads ecosystem, and then use that intelligence to create more targeted, timely, and engaging organic and promoted content on Twitter.
And just as other social platforms have found great efficiency and innovation by offloading tool-building onto a ready and willing developer base, the same goes for Twitter. By exposing an API set that’s mutually monetizable from day one, developers can focus on building the best possible services for creating social ads in all touch points, while Twitter can focus on the existential battle of demonstrating why it may be the most effective destination for your social dollars.
#Differentiators
As every social platform fights to win more of your marketing dollars by demonstrating their strengths, it helps to take stock of some of Twitter’s biggest opportunities. Tweeting’s real-time and bite-size nature creates a high volume of ephemeral content. Twitter is inherently mobile… 60% of active users use mobile devices and mobile users are 86% more likely to engage on Twitter multiple times through each day. In addition, a mobile user is far more likely to tweet, retweet, and engage in general on the platform.
And when you hear “mobile”, don’t forget this also means “second screen”. Live events and shows can be leveraged so that a mobile, second screen experience greatly enhances the main stage while providing additional, better targeted advertising opportunities.
To top it off, last year’s introduction of Twitter Cards allows brands to embed far richer media and interactive experiences within each Tweet. Using a Cards-integrating platform like Thismoment means you can prioritize those deeply engaging objects as high-impact Tweets that merit promotional budget.
So what happens when you throw an API in front of this ad opportunity? With the right 3rd party platform, you can not only schedule your tweets but also their amplification. You can adjust your audience targeting and spend manually or programmatically as you get real-time performance feedback, capturing look-before-its-gone opportunities with specific times and locations. Most importantly, you can coordinate your advertising strategy cohesively across a growing array of social touch points, so that you can best understand which destinations fit your needs and how to win within each context.
What’s Next?
For all of us at Thismoment, cross-platform coordination has been a core philosophy behind our product since version 1.0, so Twitter’s Ads API fits perfectly with our vision. But in the grand scheme of things, DEC is the platform that powers your dynamic brand experience, not the place for you to optimize your ad budgets and segment your ad audiences. Just as Twitter is more than happy to let new and established ads platforms take up the reigns of brand ad management, Thismoment is equally excited for innovative cross-platform ad technologies to partner with our own APIs to create a true enterprise powerhouse combining our content creation, engagement, and analytics with partners’ targeting, listening, and purchasing tools.
And the best part: Ads APIs make a platform money, they make 3rd parties money, and they empower brands to provide fans with better, more engaging content. As long as Twitter doesn’t sacrifice the best parts of their user experience to make room for more ads (and they’ve specifically spoken against this scenario), they have positioned themselves as a force to be reckoned with and motivated everyone else to keep stepping up their game and providing engaging, relevant, non-invasive organic and paid content units.
-Jon Eccles
Product Manager, Social Integration
