Are Twitter Ads on the Verge of a Feature Development Boom?

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Twitter Ads have changed a lot in 2013. A year ago, it was a clumsy, messy interface (albeit exciting). This year, their advertising product has been cleaned up, streamlined and propelled forward with new features like keyword match types, Lead Generation Cards and enhanced reporting.

While speaking and attending conferences over the past few weeks, I’ve had several conversations on the state of the Twitter Ads platform. Most social advertisers agree that Facebook Ads (amazingly) is the “mature” platform in the paid social world. Twitter Ads is still very much in it’s infancy. Given the year that the platform has had, most folks are asking the question: What’s next?

Unless you were sleeping under a rock, you saw that Twitter just had a very successful IPO. The fact that their ads platform transformed so drastically in 2013 is no longer a surprise. Twitter now has shareholders and has to make the big money. How do they do that? Ads.

We have an example of this; just look to Facebook. While they had poured significant resources into their ads platform before they went public, their ads team grew and was better funded after. Why? The ads platform makes the company money.

My prediction is that Twitter Ads is going to continue to evolve in awesome ways in 2014. The limitations we see now will be fixed and exciting new features we haven’t even dreamed up yet will come our way:

• Conversion tracking? I hope!
• Additional data fed through the URL string.
• Expansion of Lead Gen Cards to allow additional fields.
• Evolving promoted tweet ad units. Images? They started down that path with the Lead Gen Card!
• My biggest wish: Remarketing.

At this point, we can only wish and dream. But given the precedence set by Facebook Ads after their IPO, the signs point to a similar renaissance within Twitter Ads. Either way, here’s to an exciting 2014 in social media advertising!

Have an opinion on the future of Twitter Ads? Leave a comment!