Twitter ups social marketing game with Ads API; partners with Adobe, Salesforce

Twitter is looking to expand its advertising product portfolio and revenue with a new API for ad campaigns through specific marketing partners.

Enter the Twitter Ads API, touted by the San Francisco-based company to "approach encourages ads that are engaging, relevant and useful."

The API has been in test mode since January, and Twitter has already enlisted a quintet of major marketing partners, consisting of Adobe, Salesforce.com, Shift, TBG Digital, and HootSuite.

April Underwood, product manager for revenue at Twitter, explained in the announcement on Wednesday that the idea behind the API is to reward "marketers for being good, not for being loud."

Essentially, that means making digital advertising better rather than just making more digital ads in general. Here's more on how it works:

What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies. Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers. With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.

Mike Lazerow, chief marketing officer for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, added in a separate blog post that the integration of the Twitter Ads API will enable marketers to "manage Twitter advertising at scale alongside all of their existing social marketing programs with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud."

In describing Adobe's API testing experience thus far, Justin Merickel, senior director of new product innovation for advertising solutions within Adobe’s Digital Marketing unit, added that some of the potential ben­e­fits include the abil­ity to quickly set budgets and preferences for ads by targeted locations, devices and other demographics.

By using gran­u­lar tar­get­ing, test­ing dif­fer­ent bid lev­els and seg­ment­ing cam­paigns by regions, Media Opti­mizer was able to increase our fol­lower base by 63%. At the same time, we saw the total Cost Per Fol­low (CPF) decrease by close to 60%, or approx­i­mately $2.00. Two key com­po­nents of our CPF improve­ment were access­ing less expen­sive impres­sions as well as achiev­ing bet­ter con­ver­sion rates from those impressions.

Twitter plans to add more partners to the API program in coming months, and the microblogging giant is taking applications now.