Twitter opens up self-serve advertising platform to all businesses

Self-serve advertising on Twitter will now be widely available to all users rather than invite-only, the company announced Tuesday.

The move, while not surprising, formally opens the doors for Twitter to make more money on its advertising platform and demonstrates that the company is now ready to sell ads on a larger scale. The success of the advertising network Twitter is creating will likely have a significant impact on its business model, and therefore the success of an IPO if the company goes public later this year or next, as many expect.

“Over the past year we’ve listened carefully to feedback from the thousands of businesses and individuals who’ve had access to the self-serve tool, and madeenhancements based on their suggestions, including more targeting and reporting in the UI. It’s because of this feedback that effective today, we’re ending our invite-only period and opening signups for our self-serve ad platform to all users in the U.S.”

Twitter first launched the self-serve ad product in March 2012 and started working with a limited group of partners, and over the past year the company has announced a variety of improvements to the product that have initially been available to those invite-only clients.

For instance, Twitter started allowing companies to advertise based on the words people use in their tweets (so if you tweet about wanting ice cream, you might see a Ben & Jerry’s ad), and based on the accounts you follow (so if you follow a lot of basketball-related accounts, you might see a March Madness promoted tweet.) The changes have been focused on refining the ads to make them more relevant and hopefully interesting to users, which could then benefit Twitter and the businesses if users are more likely to click.