Twitter launches Promoted Products for small business advertisers who use American Express

Twitter has today launched its advertising program specifically aimed at small businesses with an American Express card. The program appears to be designed as a test run for rolling out advertising options suited to smaller businesses on a larger scale.

The test group will be small at first, with a larger group getting access to the product after a few weeks.

Twitter says that it wanted to make the process simple, allowing business owners to ‘get started in minutes’ with no previous experience in advertising. It offers benefits like gaining new followers and amplifying your tweets through Twitter’s automated services, which will help you automatically identify and leverage the Tweets that hit home with your audience the most.

Users of the program pay per follower gained when using the Promoted Accounts product, and per-click, retweet, reply or favorite for Promoted Tweets. They are also offering targeting by region, including cities, countries or worldwide areas.

Promoted Tweets will simply pull one that Twitter deems to be likely to be enjoyed by your users from your existing trove of tweets. It will place it in their timeline, but you only get charged if they follow you or engage in your tweet in some ways. The Promoted Accounts feature places your account into the ‘who to follow’ box of users who Twitter feels are likely to be a good match for you, and likely to follow.

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The program is currently open only to American Express card holders or merchants who accept the card. If you fit into that category and want to try out the promoted products, you can register here. As a bonus, American Express will give $100 in free Twitter advertising to the first 10,000 eligible Cardmembers and merchants that register. After this initial run, the program is likely to be expanded out beyond just Amex customers, but this should serve as an initial jaunt that helps Twitter work out the bugs in its advertising system.

Late last month, Twitter announced that it would begin showing ads in its official mobile apps, in addition to its desktop services, but it only showed them to you if they were following the brand who initiated the campaign. Last week, Twitter said that it was expanding this test, enabling brands to target Promoted Tweets to mobile users that “share similar interests with their existing followers. ”