Seemingly, Twitter now wants its fair share of the social advertising action and looks set to challenge Facebook.

Its Twitter Ads service, which works by pushing tailored tweets into users’ feeds to drive web traffic, app instals and more, launched for SMEs in the US back in April 2013 before entering the UK, Ireland and Canada later that year.

The next 18 months saw the focus on entrepreneurs continue as other supported countries included Australia, Indonesia and others around Europe and Latin America. 

However, the firm has now made a mass expansion availability in 33 countries to now serve more than 200 territories.

“Today, we’re excited to expand our self-service ads platform. Now, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) from Honduras to Hong Kong can more effectively reach their target audiences on Twitter in 15 languages,” said Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s VP of global online sales.

“In addition, we’re happy to announce that there are now approximately 100,000 active advertisers on Twitter, including SMBs.”

Read more on social media:

• A breakdown of how the average Brit spends time online each day
• A masterclass on winning fans for your business by Tony Hawk, Trevor Noah and Matthew Weiner
• Facebook’s Instant Articles: A response to consumers’ increasingly short attention spans

Facebook, meanwhile, reached a major milestone in August as founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed the firm has topped over one billion users in a single day, which he said brings “a stronger economy with more opportunities”.

Throughout 2015 the social network has introduced numerous business-centric schemes, and Real Business had the opportunity to speak with Facebook’s SMB regional director, Ciaran Quilty, at the company’s debut London SME Bootcamp.

He used sunglasses firm Hawkers as an example of what the company is providing. The team of four started using Facebook ads with a €30 coupon and within six months they had scaled to 30 staff and 25,000 product sales.

With case studies like that, 40m small businesses now have pages on Facebook and two million are active advertisers. In August, the firm also introduced private messaging to make communications between businesses and consumers more personal – apparently taking inspiration from Twitter’s direct messaging feature.

By Zen Terrelonge