This email arrived in my In box just a few moments ago:
As you can plainly see, Twitter has started offering users $100 in an effort to encourage more advertising sign-ups. What’s not clear to me — and I’ve reached out to Twitter Communications to learn more — is who all is getting these emails and how many are being sent.
Twitter’s self-serve ad product is still invite-only, and was originally focused on small business owners. But the company has been sending out invites to more accounts: the account for my (non-profit) U2 fan site was invited to advertise a couple days ago, and my personal account got an invite a month or two ago.
The $100 offer is a more aggressive incentive to get users to give Twitter ads a try. The fine print at the end of the email explains that the discount is only for accounts with a U.S. billing address that have never advertised on Twitter — in other words, people like me that have been invited to advertise, may have kicked the tires a bit, but decided against it.
I asked around on Twitter while writing this story, and others are saying they’ve also recently received the $100 incentive offer.
Twitter has been extremely deliberate and cautious in how it’s rolled out its ad products over the past couple years. The $100 discount/incentive doesn’t change that, but it does strike me as Twitter’s first really aggressive financial effort to turn regular users into advertisers.
Postscript: Twitter declined to answer specific questions about the $100 incentive, and instead shared its boilerplater comment about its ad products:
As with all of our advertising efforts, we are being thoughtful and deliberate in how we roll out self-serve to all kinds of small and local businesses. We are testing out various ways to roll out this offering, including offers to Twitter users who could gain value from the solution.
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