While Twitter continues to see strong growth in membership and activity (200 million tweets now posted daily) the microblogging site has not even started to come close to the sort of advertising revenues being enjoyed by the other big social networks. Twitter only started offering advertising as recently as April 2010 and forecasts for this year expect advertising revenue of $150 million. That might seem like a reasonable sum, until it is compared to the likes of Facebook, which is expected to generate $4 billion in advertising during the same period. Twitter is, however, taking steps to address this and is looking to attract advertisers in a number of different ways. The company recently announced that promoted tweets ‘inline’ would be launched in August 2011 and now news has surfaced of a more significant development that Twitter hopes will net some large advertising contracts. Insiders have announced that the company will soon launch an application programming interface (or API) that will allow advertisers and marketing groups to deliver advertising on Twitter in significant volumes. The move mirrors the sort of software tools that already exist that help the largest online marketing agencies deliver advertising in the right quantities. Online campaigns often comprise hundreds, if not thousands of variations on a single banner design and providing an automated capability to upload these adverts is the only way that Twitter can attract the big advertisers. Details of the launch are currently very limited. Scheduled to start towards the end of 2011, the API will initially be rolled out as a test involving a small number of key partners. Subject to satisfactory performance and consumer reaction, this will then be widened out to all advertisers some time thereafter. In its initial form, the API will allow advertisers to automatically deliver adverts in one of two different formats, either through Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts. Both these capabilities are relatively self-explanatory, with Promoted Tweets comprising sponsored messages and Promoted Accounts getting increased coverage and sponsorship to users of the service. Twitter has always taken a moderate, cautious approach when it comes to advertising on the site. The site has always been fearful of alienating its users with a barrage of unwanted advertising and maintains that the service will be trialled cautiously. The simplicity and brevity of Twitter means that any kind of advertising or promotional activity is very evident and the site will be keen to ensure that it doesn’t undermine the good work fulfilled to date in keeping its members committed to the concept. Commercially, however, the site is under increasing pressure to justify its perceived valuation and needs to find a balance between looking after its users and generating a healthy income. Twitter previously said that it had planned to introduce a self-serve advertising system by the end of the year, and this could form part of that change. Self-serve advertising allows small businesses that have limited internal resource to set parameters around certain campaigns, including the overall budget for spend. The system then manages the placement and publication of advertising within those parameters thereafter. This kind of advertising can be highly lucrative, because the tools enable such simple, real-time monitoring of what works and what doesn’t. There has been no official announcement on the matter from Twitter as yet, but it looks as though 2011 is shaping up to be the year that Twitter starts to demonstrate its revenue potential in a big way for the first time. Category:Home › Other • Pomegranates: A newly discovered superfood • Where did the joke why did the chicken cross the road come from and why is it funny? • Can mothers diagnosed with bipolar disorder make good parents? • Spiritual evolution of human consciousness • Tips for getting a college basketball scholarship • Living with Pseudotumor cerebri (PTC) • Caring for the caregiver • Technologys impact on society