Twitter launches its advertising API

Twitter today unveiled its advertising API, a step it hopes will make it easier for companies to create ad campaigns on Twitter, and that's aimed at showing users the most relevant promoted tweets.

Since Twitter's earliest days, one of the criticisms about the company's business model was that it wasn't built to generate significant revenue -- especially not enough to reward investors who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Twitter. But in recent years, the microblogging service has been bolstering its advertising business, and Twitter is now considered a bona fide advertising platform for a wide variety of companies.

The company has been bolstering that platform, adding things like Twitter Cards, and a much richer set of content -- photos, videos, article summaries, and more -- than it had when it was just a 140-character text-delivery mechanism. All of that is designed, in part at least, to give advertisers a better medium for creating rich messages. Indeed, some of the moves Twitter has made have been all about enhancing revenue. As Twitter put it today, "Our system rewards marketers for being good, not for being loud. And this approach encourages ads that are engaging, relevant, and useful."

With the new advertising API, marketers will "soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns -- and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies," the company said in a blog post.

As part of its announcement, Twitter also unveiled the initial set of partners that have been testing the API since last month: Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, Shift, and TBG Digital. Twitter said it is now accepting applications from companies interested in being part of the next round to use the API.