O2 & Twitter announce partnership to support UK SMEs with £1M ad credit

O2 will provide educational content from Twitter, specific to the small business audience, with marketing tips and best practice advice. Eligible UK SMEs will also receive a share of £1million free advertising credit on Twitter’s self-service advertising platform — which also launched today.

In addition, O2 Business is today launching a unique O2 social insights tool to provide small businesses already using Twitter with advice to improve their social media outreach and activities, including:

Social League: a social media leader board where small businesses can track and rank themselves against all the other companies that have signed up. This allows each business to compare themselves by size, region and sector.

Dashboard: this enables small businesses to check how their social activity is performing and monitor their influence and outreach, milestones and achievements. The dashboard helps businesses understand how their social media performance changes over time based on their activity.

Social Toolkit: content delivered straight to each member’s account, providing useful tips, guides, FAQs and case studies on social media best practice.  Content will be sourced from the UK’s best social media channels and news sites.

The announcement coincides with Twitter’s news that it is today opening up its self-service advertising platform to small and medium-sized businesses in the UK.

To celebrate the partnership, O2 Business is giving qualifying businesses that sign up to its social league a kick-start with a £50 credit to spend on Twitter’s new small business advertising platform. In addition, O2 is running a two week-long competition on Twitter from November 18 through its business channel, @O2BusinessUK, that will see one business win a year’s free advertising on Twitter.

Ben Dowd, Business Director at O2 said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be partnering with Twitter to equip Britain’s small businesses with the tools they need to succeed and grow in digital Britain. We truly believe our O2 social insights tool is one of the best free resources available.

“During conversations with our small business customers we are often told that what they really need is advice to understand how they can use platforms like Twitter, and we believe that it’s our responsibility as both a large corporate and a digital services company to  guide them. That’s why we are investing our time, money and expertise in this new O2 social insights platform.”

Barry Collins, Director of SMB EMEA at Twitter added: “People around the world use Twitter to grow their small businesses by connecting with existing customers and reaching out to new ones. We are excited to be working with O2 to help SMBs in the UK effectively market themselves on Twitter, both organically and using our self-service advertising platform.”

The O2 social insights tool is live today and can be accessed at [ilink url=”http://o2socialinsights.o2.co.uk”]o2socialinsights.o2.co.uk[/ilink] .

To find out more on Twitter’s advertising platform visit [ilink url=”http://www.business.twitter.com”]business.twitter.com[/ilink]