Middle Eastern companies can now promote their products and services on Twitter. This step will surely bring Twitter back to the spotlight.

In the past two to three years, we used to receive feedback from clients in different industries of their sense of hesitation when it comes to active engagement on the platform due to the fact that it did not allow anyone to advertise or escalate their brand’s name. This resulted in clients’ perceiving it as just another social media platform.

This, for the longest time, has put Facebook in the forefront as clients in this region like to set certain KPIs in place and measure what their return on investment is. The generic feedback from clients also showed that they thought it is best to use Facebook ads only to drive traffic to its pages rather than look for other platforms.

Facebook also allowed companies to measure their pages’ performance which them an increased sense of “must-have”. They could thus set budgets in their annual spend and that increased the importance of Facebook.

An issue that Twitter’s new service would eliminate is the fake “organic growth of followers”. We have seen in recent months multiple attacks on some big brand names accused of buying fake followers (fake accounts). This was a long-standing argument as these brands had no way of defending or even explaining the sudden rapid growth in their pages.

Now with the advertising option on Twitter, we will see a lot of brands investing in this new service and they will be glad to see the analytics that can now be accessed.

Let’s take a look at exactly what can companies now look forward to. ‘Promoted Tweets’ enable companies to select certain tweets and promote them in the sense that they will always be visible to their target audience. This is quite important in that a lot of companies release exciting information and want that tweet to remain visible to users who were not necessarily online at the time of its post.

The interesting thing with promoted tweets is also that it targets people similar to your own target audience which maximizes reach. It is also available on a mobile device, which is definitely a plus as statistics show us that the divide between desktop browsing and mobile browsing has changed significantly.

Promoted tweets carry a prominent placement on the site. Day in day out, users find certain topics that are ‘hot’ every day and this can assist brands to gain popularity as they can place themselves strategically.

What we have seen in the past 12 months is the growth of Twitter fans from the region. This is particularly interesting as it tells us something about how this target audience interacts or behaves online. Local users would rather use Twitter and the likes of Instagram to share their content and reach out to like-minded people as opposed to creating a detailed profile on Facebook.

 

The writer is a digital consultant at Prototype Interactive.