Twitter unveiled a service Wednesday with Nielsen that allows marketers to track results from mobile and desktop campaigns. The tool moves Promoted Tweets and other Twitter ad services into quantitative analysis, allowing brands to gauge opinions and reactions to specific topics.
The new product, Twitter Surveys, asks tweeters and readers to fill out a survey about a specific brand. The surveys serve up in user streams similar to Promoted Tweets. The questions are intended to measure the impact of a particular ad campaign to assist brands in understanding measurable brand lift from the Twitter ads.
Will Stickney, a Twitter spokesperson, said each brand will determine the ad "impact" on their respective companies through surveys related to metrics, such as awareness, perception, recall and purchase intent.
Twitter will continue to work with a handful of partners to test the service through the year, but plans to open it to other brands in early 2013.
Twitter's U.S. ad revenue is estimated to reach $259 million in 2012, up from $134 million in the previous year, according to eMarketer. The research firm estimates worldwide revenue at $288 million this year, up from $139 million in 2011.
Twitter will also offer the survey feature on the mobile platform. eMarketer estimates Twitter U.S. net mobile ad revenue in 2012 to reach nearly $130 million, up to 272 million in 2013, and $444 million in 2014.
A report published earlier this year by Forrester Research Analyst Tracy Stokes explains how social continues to change the approach marketers use to build brands. Some 93% of marketers said they need to reinvent their brand-building strategies as a result of social and mobile, and 92% said social media has fundamentally changed how consumers engage with their brands.