• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 4, 2015

Another day, another new targeting opportunity for Twitter advertisers.

The microblogging giant just made it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to promote Tweets that have already resonated well with their existing followers.

Directly from their Tweet activity dashboard, a new “quick promote” feature allows SMBs “to get their best content in front of more people,” according to Buster Benson, a product manager in Twitter’s Revenue department.

Selected tweets will automatically be targeted to users who have interests similar to advertisers’ existing followers, Benson explains in a new blog post.

Twitter has found that users who see a relevant Promoted Tweet from an SMB are 32% more likely to visit that business. The feature expands on Twitter’s self-service ad platform, which made its debut in 2013. Since then, the company has rolled out objective-based campaigns, reports and pricing to make it easier for businesses to manage their Twitter campaigns.

Twitter is pushing out new ad products left and right. Just yesterday, the social network announced plans to expand Promoted Tweets beyond its own borders.

Yet, analysts say Twitter appears to be fighting an uphill battle. “Just 18 months ago, Twitter was clearly the [No. 2] consumer social network, but now it appears to have tumbled into fourth place, [while] relative newcomers like Instagram and Pinterest have spent the last year collecting more and more new users,” Forrester Research analyst Nate Elliott said on Tuesday.

The problem is that Twitter has acquired only a modest number of new users in the past year, while last quarter, its per-user engagement rates actually declined, according to Elliott. Partly as a result, CEO Dick Costolo is reportedly under increasing pressure to step down.

In the third quarter, Twitter’s revenue — up 114% year-over-year to $361 million — was in line with analysts’ expectations. Yet, user growth — and a fourth-quarter revenue forecast of $440 to $450 million — fell short of analysts’ hopes.

SMBs, however, offer hope for Twitter and other social leaders. In fact, SMBs that spend more than $25,000 annually on advertising and promotion plan to allocate 17.4% of their marketing budgets to social media in 2015, according to BIA/Kelsey's latest Local Commerce Monitor study.