Twitter is rolling out its self-service ad platform next month through a partnership with American Express to get access to over 10,000 small and medium sized businesses. It’s not the first time that American Express is reaching out to social media. Earlier last year American Express launched a deal with Foursquare so that card members across the USA could start discover exclusive specials on the check-in service.

Twitter to open up self-service ad platform - why not use Skimlinks?

However, there it’s more than just that. Twitter needs to broaden its revenue streams, quickly. And this is a way to do so.

The 10,000 businesses that will be able to register to use the platform on a first-come, first-serve basis. Those who sign up receive $100 in advertising credits to put towards bidding on promoted tweets and promoted accounts.

The self service platform allows advertisers to make electronic payments instead of being invoiced by Twitter’s sales team. Which basically was just impossible to handle on the long run, automatization still is king, and it kinda surprises me that Twitter didn’t realize this earlier. Currently Twitter has 3,000 advertisers and it now hopes to attract the smaller business into its pond.

I’m kinda sceptic though if Twitter is the way to go for advertising for most of these small businesses. Twitter is pre-dominantly mobile – and although mobile is becoming mature very quickly most business simply don’t have websites or ordering pages which are optimized for mobile use. It’s exactly the same problem which Google’s Adwords program is facing. Most advertisers just don’t have mobile friendly websites crushing much of the possible return.

I would have expected Twitter to join hands with companies facilitating the mobile usage of websites, creating forms etc which are easy to handle on mobiles (not those ugly designed mobile Google templates).

Monetize outbound links

Twitter to open up self-service ad platform - why not use Skimlinks?

But, is Twitter really checking into the right corner when it comes to monetizing their network? Why not leverage that what its users share the most: links. Unlike the bigger social media platforms, most smaller social hubs have embraced such companies like Skimlinks who monetize links posted by members on forums etc. In other words, they monetize the outbound traffic. Just recently Skimlinks got some extra attention because Pinterest is also using it (some journalists made a big fuzz about it, we still wonder why because Pinterest is a free service).

Anyhow, how does it work? A script ‘translates’ every link on your forum or blog and turns it into an affiliated link. Anno 2012 Skimlinks aggregates more than 17,000 merchants across 27 networks internationally which gives web publishers lots of opportunities to monetize traffic. Of course the merchants already active via Skimlinks might be less pleased to see that their social media traffic via Pinterest and co will now be less free, but also here: a free lunch doesn’t exist. On the other hand advertisors will only pay based on CPA and it will show even more what platforms are monetizing the best.

All in all, it’s quite a frictionless way of getting that massive outbound traffic monetized. So, Twitter, creating extra commercial promoted tweets might just not be the perfect option to get your service monetized.

Not with Facebook

Note though that Facebook has blocked all of  the Skimlinks generated links. For some odd reason Facebook never thought about using the service. When I talked about this to people at Facebook’s Dublin office last year they didn’t even know the service existed, and instead informed me that they would be blocking it. A pity. Or is Facebook working on a similar service?

While Pathgate is still creating heated emotions here and there, Mike Arrington, whose CrunchFund is an investor in Path, published a post on his personal blog in which he points out that Foursquare is also uploading your contact data when you create a Foursquare account. Again, normal best practice.

Foursquare uploads your contacts - so what ?

Arrington however goes overboard – probably because he fears that Path will become the scapegoat – when he says that Apple is the culprit of it all. According to Arrington Apple should not have allowed this in the first place. But really Mike, if someone gives you a shotgun, does it mean you have to shoot someone? No. Apple isn’t at fault and nor are the developers because in the best interest of users contact uploads should continue to exist to create less friction when using an app.

All in all this ‘Pathgate’ gets really ridiculous, especially because many of the blog posts are clearly written by people who either never have developed an app or never even wondered how it’s possible that you can share so many things from inside an app without going to the trouble of importing, sorting out etc.

Don’t use social layered apps if you don’t want to use it for what it’s been built for in the first place: sharing (so the app can get popular as well).

A while ago, we advised one of our clients to use Foursquare for their company so their customers would be able to follow their grocery deliveries throughout the country. But it can go beyond just commercial use.

Toronto Police Constable Scott Mills, for instance, is encouraging officers everywhere to use Foursquare to connect with their communities or ‘neighborhoods’ as they call it over there. Scott checks in when he’s giving community talks, to let people know when and where he’s on patrol, or to keep them posted on breaking crime scenes.

The results? People love to comment on Scott’s check-ins, come say hi when he’s nearby, and even oust him as the Mayor of the police station headquarters.

Slideshare has a presentation on this subject which you should check out.

foursquare chakra restaurant

At muztec we have been using Foursquare regularly to discover new places to go out.  For instance, when we were in Tallinn, Estonia, this delicious Indian Restaurant popped up on our iPhone when I checked Foursquare together with a colleague.

We read what people were saying about it and decided to have a try (it was an excellent move as it’s THE place to be there for Indian food, but that’s another story).

Basically, this is also what Foursquare is now trying to tell to people who are not yet using the service. You’ll be able using it, to find restaurants, to find friends, hell, even to make friends.

At the moment this check-in service has 15 million users worldwide, mostly in the USA but growing in Europe as well.  While this is peanuts compared to the almost 1 billion Facebook users, it is still a fairly massive community worth targeting. Are you truly hip? Then realise that there is some real value on the streets here for companies.

Being clever and creative is a condition. Check out the below video.