Twitter has announced that it will allow paid advertising for the first time. Since its establishment there has been continued speculation when Twitter will incorporate paid advertising and we finally have an answer.
According to the New York Times – the first to report the announcement – the new advertising platform is called ‘Promoted Tweets’ and will display ads that show when twitter users search for keywords in which advertisers have bought a link to their ads.
“When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow.”
Currently the advertising platform is only open to a select few companies including Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo – companies that are already highly active on Twitter.
The New York Times also sates that Twitter are also looking to eventually show promoted posts in a user’s Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser. This aspect is likely to cause a bit of a stir as the article points out that ‘Twitter users could resent seeing promoted posts in their personal content stream’. This is something that Twitter is currently mulling over and so it may be a few months before we see this just yet.
Promoted Tweets comes only a day after TweetUp was announced. Created by Bill Gross TweetUp will compete with Promoted Tweets and will allow advertisers to bid on keywords and have their profile or individual tweets show up in Tweetup’s sponsored listings when someone performs a Twitter search. The results are said to show up on partner sites such Business Insider and Answers.com.
It will be interesting to see how well Promoted Tweets will work. Comparisons have been drawn with Google whose advertising platform AdWords saw the company transform into the global giant we see today. However there is a fundamental difference with Twitter and that is user intent. A huge number of searches on Google are based around people explicitly looking for products and services; will people looking up Tweets be looking for the same thing? It is highly likely they won’t be as Twitter is much more informational driven and it is this difference that will make the progress of Promoted Tweets interesting to follow.
An interesting post from Mashable discusses whether Promoted Tweets will be a success or not which is worth a read. Further information can be seen on Twitter’s official announcement on their official blog.