Twitter Syndicates Ads with Flipboard and Yahoo Japan

A mock-up of a promoted Tweet on the Flipboard app
A mock-up of a promoted Tweet on the Flipboard app

Twitter is to begin selling its Promoted Tweet ad product outside of its core website and apps, thanks to sealed partnerships with news-reading app Flipboard and Yahoo Japan which will introduce the ads to a wider audience.

The social network has struggled to grow its ad platform, and as it prepares to disclose its quarterly earnings report, it appears it has found one solution to making its ads a more appealing proposition.

The deal will enable brands to run simultaneous campaigns across Twitter, Flipboard and Yahoo Japan, placing promoted tweets into streams featured on the two syndicated websites.

According to Twitter, there are thousands of web and mobile applications that feature syndicated tweets as a way of including real-time content, using products like Fabric and Twitter for Websites. If the social network is able to establish similar deals with other large-scale publishers, it could dramatically increase the reach of its ad platform.

“What makes Twitter unique is that Tweets can flow from Twitter to other mediums seamlessly, like TV, websites and mobile applications,” said Ameet Ranadive, senior director of product at Twitter. “In fact, in the third quarter of 2014 there were approximately 185bn tweet impressions off of Twitter.”