Twitter Enters the Advertising Market with “Promoted Tweets”
April 30th, 2010
Twitter has grown exponentially in the last few years, but so far there has been little movement towards a profitable business model. Now, with “Promoted Tweets,” Twitter has made a big step toward true Tweet-based advertising.
Twitvertising
The social networking site, now the third-most popular in the U.S. (after Facebook and MySpace), has said it will bump sponsored Tweets from companies and other account holders who pay to have their tweets displayed to the top of the heap when users search for specific content.
The site’s users might not even notice the advertisements on a day-to-day basis. Before “Promoted Tweets,” if you searched for a company like Starbucks, the top hits would be the most recent tweets that contained that word. Now, with Twitter’s new ad model, a search will still return a list of Starbucks-related tweets, but now it may be headed by a promoted tweet: An advertisement (140 characters or less) sent from an official Starbucks account. Users could then view further paid tweets by following a business’ sponsored account. The popularity of each promoted tweet will be tracked carefully, with unpopular ads disappearing from search results more quickly than more popular tweets.
Consequences for Third-Party Developers?
Other companies, like TweetUp, have attempted to monetize Twitter advertising by offering businesses the opportunity to bid on keywords that will help their Tweets move up in the search rankings. Now these types of third-party start-ups will have to compete with Twitter itself for advertising revenue.
Whether Twitter will succeed selling ads remains to be seen. But facilitating advertisements seems like a logical first step toward turning the rapid growth and popularity of Twitter into tangible revenue.
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