"Twitter Goes Google With Launch of Self-Serve Small Business Ads"

It took awhile, but Twitter today formally launched its self-service ad platform for small businesses. It’s the service’s answer to Google‘s AdWords, the automated ad system that catapulted the search engine into the most powerful company in online advertising. Here’s the video promo:

Few people expect Twitter’s business to match Google’s incomparable ad juggernaut, exactly. But it’s a huge step toward capturing the long tail of businesses that want to use Twitter to promote themselves via the two current ad formats, Promoted Tweets and

Promoted Accounts–without Twitter having to hire legions of salespeople to get them on board. No doubt the self-serve system will be popular, assuming it delivers as well as most people expect.

The question will be how popular. We won’t know that until we see 1) whether small businesses actually get what they think will be a decent return on ad spend; 2) whether Twitter’s famously inadequate infrastructure can handle the load; and 3) whether Twitter can keep businesses from so annoying its users that they start to ignore the ads like they do all those display ads–you know, all those banners? No?

The platform was actually launched in test mode last December to selected businesses, and even today, will be available initially to about 10,000 cardmembers and merchants using American Express.

It’s all in the video, but here are the highlights from Twitter’s announcement:

* Get started in minutes: we provide ongoing management of your advertising.

* No previous advertising experience is required. If you can tweet, you can advertise on Twitter.

* Gain new followers: Promoted Accounts helps your small business connect with new people who want to hear from you and can spread the word about your business to others.

* Amplify your Tweets: Promoted Tweets helps your small business get your messages in front of more of the right people. Twitter will take out the guesswork by automatically identifying and promoting your most engaging Tweets.

* Pay per follower for Promoted Accounts and per engagement (click, retweet, reply, and favorite) for Promoted Tweets.

* Target the whole world, specific countries, or limit your reach to specific U.S. metropolitan areas.