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"Twitter is planning to introduce its advertising products to nearly 50 more countries as it seeks additional revenue outside of the U.S., Twitter executives announced at a festival in Cannes, France, Thursday morning.\nAccording to a Twitter spokesperson, Twitter's Promoted ads suite \u2014 which includes Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts \u2014 will roll out in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands later this year. Promoted ads are currently only available to marketers in the U.S., UK and Japan.\nTwitter is expected to bring in $259.9 million in ad revenue this year, according to eMarketer. Currently, 90% of ad revenue come from U.S. companies, the researcher said.\nUnlike many other web-based publishers, Twitter doesn\u2019t depend on display advertising for the bulk of its ad revenue. Instead, its ad units are baked in to its core features, including trending topics and tweets, which are served in almost identical fashion on Twitter's desktop and mobile platforms. Facebook has recently begun imitating Twitter's ad products to boost mobile revenue by serving Sponsored Stories in the mobile and desktop News Feeds of its users.\nOn stage, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo noted that 60% of users access Twitter via mobile, and that mobile revenue exceeds non-mobile revenue some days, according to The Guardian, who attended the event.\nCo-founder Jack Dorsey fielded a question about a potential IPO. \"The company has always put itself in a position to choose when it is ready [to IPO or be acquired]. We do things when we are ready. We have a good understanding about pacing and have the discipline to make the choices ourselves,\" he said.\n\n\n5 Proven Twitter Marketing Strategies\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n1. Use Promoted Trends or Promoted Tweets to Publicize an Event\nTwitter is all about discovering what\u2019s going on right now. As Bain notes, many users return to Twitter\u2019s homepage a few times per day just to see what\u2019s trending. Promoted Trends leverage that phenomenon by giving advertisers a premium position on the page. Bain says that this can yield much higher engagement rates than standard online advertising, for example, banner ads. Introduced in 1993, banners have notoriously low click-through rates, even though such advertising is still growing rapidly. (Proponents of banners also point out that, while the ads work fine for raising awareness, direct sales are still measured by clicks.) Nevertheless, Bain says Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets yield engagement rates between 3% and 10% on average, and sometimes much higher than that. For instance, Volkswagen got 52% engagement on an April 18 Promoted Tweet for its 2012 New Beetle launch. In this case, engagement is defined by click-throughs (which usually accounts for 80% of the total), retweets and \u201Cfavorited\u201D tweets. The buying process for Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets and all of Twitter\u2019s ad products follow a model similar to  Google's -- marketers buy them in an auction at a cost-per-engagement rate, and then pay based on engagement. Obviously, if you\u2019re running a Promoted Trend or Promoted Tweet, it helps if you have some kind of news, product launch, or associated event. For instance, For instance, Coca-Cola earned high engagement during the 2010 World Cup \u2014 whenever a goal was scored, Coke would unleash a celebratory tweet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2. Build the Brand With Promoted Accounts\nWhile Coke\u2019s case is instructive, Bain says that Promoted Accounts are likely a better vehicle for long-term brand building. \u201CWe ask, \u2018What\u2019s the lifetime value of a customer?\u2019\u201D Bain says, \u201CWe look at it almost like a joint business account.\u201D With a goal to gather as many followers for a corporate account as possible, Twitter positions Promoted Accounts in front of users who might be interested in the brand. Twitter gauges such interest by noting who said people follow and what they tweet. If you follow a lot of baseball teams, for instance, then a Promoted Account for Major League Baseball might make sense.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3. Use Your Hashtags\nWhile \u201Cfollow us on Twitter\u201D messages from marketers appear ubiquitous, Bain says that hashtags can be more effective. For instance, after Audi included the hashtag #ProgressIs in its Super Bowl ad, the company \u201Ccompletely dominated\u201D Twitter discussions about progress for the month, Bain says. RadioShack also used #youneedanewphone in April, and Comedy Central ran a #TrumpRoast hashtag at the bottom of the screen during its March telecast. Like Audi though, you might decide to opt for an open-ended hashtag that encourages people to add their own thoughts. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has driven engagement by running hashtags that invite audience participation, like #myparentsareweird and #thereshouldbealaw.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4. Counterprogram\nDuring March Madness, AT&amp;T aired constant television ads, but rival Verizon bought up all tourney-related Promoted Trends on Twitter. Verizon\u2019s tactic secured the online discussion, Bain says. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n5. Follow Through\nCultivating an audience for your brand via social media is more complicated than simply blasting out a TV ad. The key difference is follow-through. Patrick Kerley, senior digital strategist with Levick Strategic Communications, says that Kraft Macaroni &amp; Cheese\u2019s recent Twitter promotion illustrates the consequences of a brand that fails to recognize the campaign tools available. In March, the brand ran a program called \"Mac &amp; Jinx\" that rewarded people who used the phrase \"mac &amp; cheese\" in their tweets. Kerley won the contest and its prize, but has yet to receive an email or other promotion, despite having submitted his email address. He also notes that, at the time, around 2,700 people followed @KraftMacnCheese. Kerley suggests, \"Had the brand said, \u2018Be the first person to follow us' or 'Follow us and visit this URL,' they would very likely be sitting on a very large online audience that could be reminded every day about the brand, its products and other promotions.\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, arakonyunus"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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