Twitter is firing up its ad engine before it goes public.
The company, headed by CEO Dick Costolo, announced yesterday that its self-serve advertising product, which lets businesses push promoted tweets and accounts to the 200 million users of the network, is now available to anyone in the US. The ad product had been invite-only for the past year.
Self-serve ads have proved lucrative for powerhouses like Google and Facebook.
“Self-serve is an entree into the small-business market, which is a lucrative but largely untapped area for Twitter,” said Clark Fredricksen of eMarketer.
The platform allows businesses to reach targeted audiences with promoted tweets and accounts. Marketers pay each time a user engages with the ad or follows an account.
EMarketer estimates Twitter will double its ad revenue to $583 million this year.
Twitter is expected to explore the prospect of going public within the year, but industry watchers said it first needs to prove it is approaching a billion-dollar business to wow investors.