Twitter extends Promoted Tweets to Yahoo Japan and Flipboard

Previously, Promoted Tweets’ were only displayed on Twitter itself. The company is now aiming to reach users and monetise its advertising on third-party sites where tweets get displayed and viewed. Twitter claimed in a blog post announcing the change that “approximately 185 billion Tweet impressions” occurred outside of Twitter in the first quarter of 2014.

“For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience,” Ameet Ranadive, senior product director, wrote in the post.

With the company’s quarterly earnings report due out in the next few days, the announcement solidifies Twitter's aim of reaching external users and monetising its advertising amid concerns of slowing user growth.

According to Antoine Malin, social manager at Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon Tokyo, the partnership with Yahoo Japan is a “strategic alliance” and will allow Twitter to “benefit from a localised database”. Additionally, it will open up opportunities to SMEs.

“Previously it was expensive to use promoted Tweets,” said Mailin. “Twitter was targeting bigger companies and corporations, and the minimum for starting an account was around $4,000. The minimum is now around $10. This will open up a new market.”

Malin added that Twitter has been successful in Japan where “personal information and privacy is a strong preference” and “140 characters in Japanese can communicate a lot of information.”

Example of a Twitter promoted Tweet inside the Flipboard app

“Twitter has something like 25 million users in Japan, so it’s as big as Facebook,” said Malin. “We’ve been using promoted Tweets quite successfully. In the morning commute you see people on the train using Twitter. It has 85 per cent mobile penetration, higher than the Twitter global average.”

According to a Twitter spokesperson, the company is still in the early stages of bringing on new partners globally. “For years, publishers have been embedding great Twitter content into their mobile apps, websites and on-air,” the spokesperson said. “This is the first time that we are giving our publishing partners the ability to also monetize these great content experiences.”

Twitter’s existing ad targeting capabilities on Twitter will carry over to syndicated Twitter ads. “We expect Promoted Tweets to perform as well off-Twitter as they do on-Twitter,” the spokesperson added. 

Asked whether Yahoo will expand the partnership beyond Yahoo Japan, a Yahoo spokesperson said the company does “not speculate on future plans”.

Adam Bain, revenue and partnerships manager at Twitter, and Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder at Flipboard have been tweeting about the partnerships following the announcements.