South African SMEs help themselves to Twitter advertising

Starting today, small businesses in South Africa can increase the impact of their Twitter marketing activities with self serve advertising products, including Tweets and Accounts. The SME advertising platform, also launching today in Israel, is currently available in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Japan.

Twitter is live, public, conversational and widely distributed. The platform has more than 255 million active users worldwide and is used by brands to engage with existing customers and reach new audiences. South African companies, like frozen yoghurt brand @Wakaberry with more than 26,000 followers and @skinnylaminx with 11,200 followers, are already using Twitter to listen to their customers and market themselves organically.

Research shows that Twitter is made for SMEs* with 72% of people more likely to make a purchase from an SME after they follow or interact with them on Twitter and 30% are more likely to recommend a business that they follow on Twitter.

“Successful small business owners intuitively know how to build meaningful relationships with their customers,” said Barry Collins, Twitter director of SMB EMEA. “They were the first to use Twitter to talk with consumers in real time, and their creativity demonstrated Twitter’s potential as a marketing platform. Today, some of the most effective marketing campaigns we see come from small, local, or Internet-only businesses tapping into Twitter’s ability to have conversations in context and on the go.”

The Twitter self-serve platform is easy to use, highly targeted and cost-effective — businesses only pay per engagement such as a retweet, reply, favorite or click — and there is no minimum spend. SMEs get the same functionality as big brands, and organic activity stays free.

South African businesses using the self serve platform can now benefit from Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Twitter also provides analytics for SMEs to track their performance on Twitter, learn more about customer behaviour and adjust campaigns to drive better results.

For more on Twitter self-service advertising and helpful tips on how to make the most of your presence on Twitter, sign up at ads.twitter.com and follow @TwitterZA_SME.