In a partnership with American Express, Twitter will roll out the self-serve ad platform it’s been testing to 10,000 SMBs next month. It will enable SMBs to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without sales representatives. Only SMBs that accept or use American Express cards are eligible to use the platform. To kickstart the effort, American Express will provide $100 in Twitter ads to the first 10,000 qualified U.S. SMBs that sign up.

SMBs can set bids for promoted accounts on a cost-per-follower basis and for promoted tweets on a cost-per-engagement basis. Twitter will only charge for ads when users actively engage with the tweet by deciding to follow the business, retweet or clicks on a link.

Self-serve is Twitter’s latest power move to solidify itself as an effective online marketing tool like search giant Google and fellow social network Facebook. EMarketer projects that Twitter’s ad revenues in 2011 were $139 million and will grow to $260 million by the end of this year. However, Twitter will have to scale the number of SMBs using the platform before seeing record growth from self-serve. In the meantime, the company is also focused on reaching the political ad market and scaling its international ad offerings.

Leslie Berland, American Express’s vice president of digital partnerships and development, will speak next month at ILM East on the intersection of local and digital.

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Facebook created quite a stir (again) with the recent projection that its global revenues could surpass $4 billion in 2011 … the majority coming from small businesses that are self serving. Now Twitter is abuzz, as eMarketer predicts that top-line income will triple to more than $150 million in 2011, and surge to $250 million in 2012. Considering that the company only began experimenting with advertising platforms last April, then elevated Dick Costolo to CEO in October to hone the network’s business model, the pressing question is “how?”

Twitter has rolled out a series of advertising trials geared to promoted products: accounts, trends and tweets. To date, these have focused almost exclusively on national brands, with the Nissans and Starbucks of the Fortune 500 galaxy grabbing the lion’s share of attention.

Now, there is increasing evidence that Twitter sees advertising scale in automated, self-serve capabilities for clients. Recently, Twitter updated its business center to include an array of educational and commercial tools, including best practices, case studies, analytics and a “get started” dashboard (see picture below).

The interface is rudimentary, asking clients only to provide estimated budget, advertising products they are interested in and contact information. This isn’t a purchase platform just yet, but a vehicle for Twitter to begin generating leads with accompanying data.

The move toward full-purpose self-serve seems natural after the examples set by Google and now Facebook. Interestingly, however, the beginning benchmark for estimated monthly spend is $10,000, a number that would challenge many SMB wallets.

Whether self-serve promoted products can scale down-market at lower price points is wait and see. But if the projections are right, then Facebook is hot on the trail of the local advertising Holy Grail — appealing to small businesses at scale with a self-serve platform that they are willing and able to utilize. If Twitter’s revenue growth is to emulate the Facebook curve, then capturing both sides of this paradigm will be critical.

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