As noted earlier by The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb, Twitter has just launched an updated guide for businesses for organizations interested in exploring how to make the most of the micro-sharing service.
Coincidentally, the @TwitterBusiness account hasn’t made followers aware of the changes yet – in fact, it’s been about a week since there’s been a tweet from the account.
Update: from the Twitter blog: It’s Business Time (and @TwitterBusiness is awake again!)
The expanded business guide includes a section that helps companies start advertising on Twitter, inviting advertisers on a “journey with the most engaging innovative ads on the web”.
I’m not so convinced about the innovativeness of the whole thing, but Twitter does an excellent job at explaining how they plan to make money through advertising (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts).
Interestingly, Twitter also touts a seemingly new product called Analytics, which lets all advertisers gain insight into both paid and unpaid activity on Twitter by offering two layers of analytics (advertising product dashboards and timeline activity).
The Start Advertising page also comes with a hard-to-miss form, inviting organizations to indicate in which advertising products they’d be interested, what kind of budget and launch date they had in mind, in which regions they operate and whether they’re for-profit or not.
It’s anything but self-serve, like Google AdWords, but it’s a start.
With the soft-launch of this form, Twitter is effectively saying that it’s now open for business, and (hopefully for them) has a sales force in place to handle all incoming requests.
Will 2011 be the year in which Twitter not only figures out how to properly make money, but also manages to scale its money-making operations in a way that can lead the company to sustainable profitability?
