The company that enabled Twitter users to sell their profile backgrounds for cash is expanding. If you missed the title of this post, we’re talking about Twittad. This Des Moines, Iowa-based startup isn’t expanding by hiring additional staff, they’re growing the services that they offer to both advertisers and users.

Over the past several months since launching, Twittad has carefully tweaked its model and made adjustments where necessary to better suit users and advertisers. First it was helping users find out what their tweets were worth, then it was helping users and advertisers earn cash through an affiliate program designed to bring in more referrals. Each action has been taken with Twittad’s audience and userbase in mind. The latest projects spearheaded by founder James Eliason are what he has dubbed the “Advertiser Campaign Program” and a monthly educational webinar series to assist advertisers in understanding how they can target their market with tools like Twitter.

On why Twittad is launching its new Advertiser Campaign Program and the monthly webinars, CEO James Eliason made his company’s intentions clear, “We want to separate ourselves from just being known as an “ad serve company” on Twitter.” He continued, “there is so much more [for businesses to know than] just serving ads on Twitter. It takes a delicate balance of education and targeting to really be successful in social media marketing.”

Putting Advertising Campaigns into the Hands of the Users

The Advertiser Campaign Program is a tool that will help Twittad advertisers find the right user profile backgrounds to purchase. Although advertisers already have a number of tools at their disposal like user demographics courtesy of Twellow, follower/following numbers and price per follower costs, this new program will allow advertisers to announce what types of campaigns they would like to run and then give interested users the ability to sign up as a promoter.

Here’s a quick rundown on how the Advertiser Campaign Program will work:

1. Advertisers can build 7 or 14 day campaigns that run exactly like the current process (background ad placement along with a “first purchased” and “final tweet” promotion of the advertiser).
2. Advertisers can target specific users they would like to participate (purchase the backgrounds of) by selecting specific demographics, locations or follower counts.
3. Advertisers select the price they are willing to pay per participant in the campaign.
4. Advertisers select the maximum number of participants they are willing to allow in the campaign.
5. The advertisers planned campaign will run its course (the clock starts ticking after first user is approved) using the users that were approved to join the campaign.

What this does for advertisers is allow the users to help drive who will be participating in any one campaign. Rather than take the time to sort through the hundreds of available Twittad users, advertisers can set their numbers, prices and message and draw out interested users. This saves the advertiser time and the trouble of finding individual users to buy.

If an advertiser chooses to select user demographics or specifics for a campaign, users with profiles matching that criteria will be notified by Twittad, thereby encouraging them to seek out these advertisers and participate in their campaigns.

For Those Who Still Don’t Get It, Twittad Can Help Make It Clear

Although Twittad has been lucky enough to work with some “perfect” advertisers lately, many are still scratching their heads about how to reach their audience on Twittad or even on Twitter itself. To remedy this situation Twittad is partnering with another Des Moines, Iowa-based company, Lava Row, to offer monthly educational webinars to participating advertisers.

The webinars will be aimed at discussing social media strategies and ways to interact with their target audience on social networks like Twitter. Lava Row will do an hour-long presentation each month for paying advertisers, as well as manage Q & A sessions and offer supporting materials. Twittad is looking to launch these education sessions toward the end of February.

There’s Also a New Bird in Town

As if launching these latest two additions wasn’t enough, Twittad is also preparing to roll out a new logo and mascot. It’s not live on their website yet, but you can check out the new bird at right.

TwittAd (@twittad), the service that helps you sell your Twitter profile background to advertisers and evaluate what your tweets are worth, launched two new features on their website yesterday. The first feature is an affiliate referral program, available for both users and advertisers, that allows the referrer to get paid when their referrals’ backgrounds are sold on TwittAd. The second feature is the implementation of a one-tweet promo message, tweeted on behalf of users whose backgrounds are purchased.

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From when TwittAd first launched, and still today, it allowed for its users to set the price and duration for ads to run as the background of a Twitter profile. In doing so, it was banking on its users to have an idea of what their tweets were worth. My first assumption was the rates were going to look like a shotgun spread but eventually flatten as companies and Twitter-ers experimented with rates and attempted to measure ROI.

For those not as bold to make up a price, the makers of TwittAd have created whatsyourtweetworth.com. This web service provides the approximate value of any user’s tweets by simply entering a username into the site. And because the site does not require users to authenticate the service can work both ways. On one side users can get an approximation of their worth and on the other companies using TwittAd can validate they are getting a fair price.

While the site doesn’t provide any insights on how this valuation is calculated it does pull the user’s followers, following and total updates count. And based on visiting the site as my counts have changed, my tweet worth per month has changed a few cents here and there.

With multiple links and notes to TwittAd it is obvious this site was launched to increase and encourage users to sell their backgrounds. What is still yet to be seen is how the community accepts this service and agrees with its valuation. Regardless, this space is fairly unexplored and if you were looking to turn a buck on your tweets this site seems to be one of the first experimenting with the calculation.

TwittAd (@twittad) is a new service created by James Eliason (@jameseliason) that allows advertisers to pay Twitter users to promote a product, website or virtually anything else through an ad uploaded to their profile background.

There has been much speculation about when this type of monetization would happen. The ability has always been present for users to upload their own backgrounds, but the discussion was fueled even more by the Mashable post describing how to set up a custom Twitter background.

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