• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 8, 2017

Having trouble building an audience on Twitter?

Well, for a flat monthly fee of $99, the company will now promote your Tweets and profile across its network.

Not for big spenders, the new Promote Mode service is designed to help small businesses and aspiring influencers run ad campaigns on Twitter.

“There’s no ad campaign management necessary,” Wook Chung, Twitter's director of product management, notes in a new blog post. “People using Promote Mode just tweet as they normally do.”

Chung says the new automated “amplification engine” is mobile-first, meaning that it can be accessed on the mobile Twitter app.

There, subscribers should find a dashboard with relevant metrics, including how many additional people their tweets reached, how many followers they’ve gained, and how many people have visited their profile over the past month.

“Performance will vary based on factors, including account type, your targeting selection, and the type and frequency of your tweets,” Chung cautions.

To some degree, “small businesses and individuals using Promote Mode can expect to gain followers and reach a broader audience each month, as long as they are actively tweeting,” according to Chung.

Along with a healthy bump in monthly users, Twitter reported better-than-expect third-quarter sales last month.

While quarterly revenue of $590 million was down 4% year-over-year, it was still better than what analysts had predicted.  

From the second quarter of the year to the third, average monthly active users (MAUs) were up 4% to 330 million, while daily active users (DAUs) were up 14%, year-over-year.

Ned Segal, Twitter’s CFO, said the company’s momentum was driven by improved execution from its sales team and strength in video and direct response ad formats.

Segal added that Twitter’s data business experienced its third consecutive quarter of accelerating year-over-year growth.

Analysts seemed pleased with Twitter’s performance. “Underlying revenue trends provided confidence that the company is on track toward a resumption of top-line growth,” Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research, said in a research note.

Wieser was particularly impressed that Twitter’s largest 100 advertisers increased spending on the platform by 23% globally and 7% domestically.