Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Twitter Launches "Promoted Tweets"

Twitter is an awesome micro-blogging tool that I personally love. Since their launch in 2007 they've been hard pressed to come up with ways to generate income. Let's face it, they're not in this because they want to give something away for free. Like the rest of us the goal is to make Twitter start paying off.

Enter "Promoted Tweets" - Similar to Google Adwords advertisers will bid on keywords and when someone conducts a search on Twitter for those keywords the Tweet (Ad) would be shown. This is the plan for the first stage of the roll out. In the second stage, ads will appear in the twitter "stream" itself. 

Don't worry, the ads will be clearly marked as such, and when hovered over turn a bright yellow color. That way they'll be easy to distinguish from regular Tweets. But that's power for the course as anyone who posts ads on Twitter need to mark them as advertising in order to be in compliance with the FTC.

Twitter's plan to measure how well the ads are performing is something they call "Resonance Score". It includes numerous factors a few of which are, how many clicks it receives, the number who viewed the ad, those who replied or forwarded it. If scores are too low, ads will stop running and advertisers will no longer pay for those ads.

Two initial customers of the service are Starbucks, and Bravo along with a few others. But I'm sure it won't take long for other big companies with deep pockets to jump on the Promoted Ad bandwagon.

No matter if you like it or not, ads are coming to Twitter. Myself, I don't mind. I use Twitter daily to post interesting links and keep up on current trends in the industry so a few ads won't bother me. What do you think?

Related Posts:

Twitter Reveals Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets

Twitter Blog


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