Today Twitter joined the ranks of fellow social media networks Facebook and LinkedIn when they announced their plans for an advertising Application Programming Interface (API). This step will allow brands to create, optimize and measure Twitter ad campaigns using third-party advertising management providers instead of purchasing individual ads from Twitter and uploading them one at a time.  In short it means advertisers will have more control of their Twitter ad campaigns.

“As interest in Twitter has grown, our focus has been on delivering better ads for users, not more ads. We believe our system is working well because users like the ads experience on Twitter. Our system rewards marketers for being good, not for being loud. And this approach encourages ads that are engaging, relevant and useful.  Towards this goal, we’re always working on ways to make it easier to manage campaigns and get more value out of advertising with us.” — Twitter

With Ads API, marketers will be able to customize their campaigns to reach a specific target audience, with the right advertisement, scaled appropriately for the desktop or mobile device. The initial partners selected to participate in the beta testing are Adobe, HootSuite, SalesForce, SHIFT and TBG Digital.

The advertising industry is all atwitter about the announcement. Here’s what they are saying:

“Marketers can now manage Twitter ads from the same systems used to manage social listening, social content and social ads for other networks. In the same way that marketers can take an engaging Facebook post and turn it into a Sponsored Story on Facebook, they can now monitor engaging tweets and turn them into Promoted Tweets, further shattering the silos between paid, owned and earned media.” – Ad Age

“At its most basic, the ad platform will allow brand managers and media buyers to spend more time on their paid Twitter campaigns’ key issues and less on the technical side, says Marcel LeBrun, senior vice president at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “You don’t want to spend all your time uploading images and playing with headlines,” LeBrun says. “You want to get to what’s working or what’s not.” – Forbes

“Until now, marketers for the most part have to manually set ad details, such as the amount of money allocated for Twitter ads and the type of users the marketers wanted to reach. The manual method clashes with how the world’s biggest marketing agencies and companies typically buy digital ads in huge volumes.” – Wall Street Journal

“The biggest implication of the ad API is that advertisers will be able to run more campaigns on Twitter, and run those campaigns quicker in more automated fashion. Previously either advertisers themselves or the social ad firms they hired had to go in and manually create and execute a Promoted Tweet campaign one at a time. The API would let them create conceivably dozens of campaigns simultaneously. “ – Ad Week

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