3 Reasons Why Marketers Should Be Excited By Twitter's New Brand Tools

By Nick Cicero at Social Fresh:
In case you missed it, Twitter recently announced a number of long-awaited improvements to its advertising platform for marketers using the site’s promoted services, including the ability to choose which tweet you promote and reporting of follower growth.
Manually selecting a Promoted Tweet is just what it says, now you can pick exactly which Tweets you want to go out, allowing for a much deeper integration of paid media in any brand’s Twitter strategy.

The follower growth chart (available for Promoted Accounts) gives a snapshot of your Twitter audience growth over time and includes paid and unpaid followers.

1. Brands asked for more and Twitter listened

When Twitter’s ad platform was first announced many marketers cried foul claiming that Twitter didn’t do enough to provide analytics for its business users, and there was a lack of relevance to promoted tweets.
Users now can now check existing engagement and demographic stats against their follower growth. The update doesn’t turn the Twitter backend into anything like SimplyMeasured, Radian6 or the like, but it’s not that bad. The important thing is people asked, and Twitter eventually delivered. Now if only they could figure out that developer thing…

2. Keeping up with the Joneses

Facebook has been pushing their fairly robust system of advertising dashboards and products for quite a bit longer than Twitter has.
As we see Twitter move into the mainstream as a widely adopted channel for communication, they needed to figure out some way to continue to bring comparable value to their advertisers like the big blue elephant in the room (which many would argue has its own set of issues).

3. The Hashtag Explosion

If you haven’t noticed, hashtags are pretty popular on Twitter. From bringing people together in Twitter Chats to being used as slang or inside jokes, the hashtag is used by nearly every demographic group on the site.
As we have seen with NASCAR Pages and the Olympics in London this year, Twitter is promoting the use of hashtags to connect individuals with one another be it on TV, at sporting events, or just locally to brand positive momentum in their own town. (See #ilovejax)