Twitter Advertising: DTC Companies as Revenue Boosters

There's a lot of chatter lately about Twitter Advertising. But most of the focus has been on large brands.

What about DTC companies? Could it be Twitter's best hope of supercharging their ad revenue? A story in four charts 📊

Advertising spend on Twitter by DTC companies is up ~15% year-over-year 📈

However, the unevenness indicates a lot of starts-and-stops, likely driven by difficulties to reliably scale campaigns.

*The dip in the past week corresponds with cyclical trends, and it's still up YoY.

Twitter has shown slow but steady growth among its competitors. The past few quarters show some promising trends 🔍

As more advertisers look to diversify away from Facebook Ads, it's a prime opportunity for these (relatively) smaller platforms to gain market share

But overall, Twitter still ranks at the bottom of social networks for DTC ad spend, coming in below Reddit and at a quarter of Snap.

Also worth noting how quickly TikTok has grown to take the #3 spot 👀 Could a Vine revival allow Twitter to compete for those ad dollars?

Excluding Google and Meta, Twitter Ads is growing among the fastest in its peer group. Time will tell if Twitter will be able to keep up this momentum.

So what can Twitter do to attract more DTC advertising under Elon Musk?

1. Ad formats that drive better engagement - interactivity is key
2. Increase the prominence of video (bringing back Vine would be huge)
3. Better targeting to help companies find their audience

Twitter advertising is definitely the underdog, but there's lots of potential! DTC marketers are looking for more platforms to reach users. And they're more willing to run tests and try new things.

If Twitter can figure this out, it would be a big win for both sides.