Twitter Introduces ‘Promoted Tweets’ Advertising Program (aka How Twitter – and Internet Marketers? – Will Monetize Twitter)
By Anna Johnson on April 14th, 2010After considerable speculation about how Twitter will monetize its estimated 22.3 million users, the company plans to offer advertising at the top of Twitter searches and, ultimately, in users’ Twitter streams, via its new ‘Promoted Tweets’ advertising program.
Essentially, Promoted Tweets will allow advertisers to display ‘advertweets’ (I like that term better than the official Promoted Tweets!) – advertisements in the form of tweets – when someone performs a search in Twitter and the search results appear.
Much as with Google’s Adwords / Adsense program and the pay-per-click programs offered by Yahoo and Bing, advertisers can buy the right to display advertweets when people search on specific keywords. Those advertisers’ advertweets will then appear at the top of the search results.
Promotional tweets will be clearly labeled as ‘promoted’ and turn yellow when someone rolls their mouse over the message. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page and users will be able to reply, retweet and ‘favorite’ it just as with regular tweets.
If, based on Twitter’s ‘resonance measurement’ system, an ad doesn’t ‘resonate’ with users, it will be removed from the search results and the advertiser won’t have to pay for it. Twitter will base ‘resonance’ on the degree to which users interact with an advertweet i.e. how many people see, reply-to, retweet, favorite and click on the link(s) in the tweet.
Ultimately, Twitter plans to allow marketers to display advertweets in Twitter users’ streams – both on their Twitter home pages and in third party Twitter clients. Twitter says it will hold off rolling out further phases of Promoted Tweets until it has assessed ‘user experience and advertiser value’.
The announcement of Promoted Tweets may be a blow to idealab which has just unveiled TweetUp as its own Google Adwords/Adsense for Twitter. Presumably, idealab CEO Bill Gross and his team expected Twitter to come out with this kind of advertising program and are unfazed by the development. Then again, perhaps Twitter’s ‘go slow’ approach to introducing Twitter features has created a false sense of security for various Twitter developers.
For its part, Twitter’s patient approach is based on sound business logic: it’s still at the center of its own ecosystem and can afford having – and actually encourage – others to explore the potential of its core application whilst evaluating what works and what doesn’t… and then implementing and monetizing what works. It’s an approach that doesn’t gel with the short attention spans of the vast majority of businesses these days, but it may just pay off.
Twitter is launching Promoted Tweets with just a handful of advertising partners including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America. Initially, advertisers will pay an amount per thousand people who see their tweet. Twitter intends to evaluate how people interact with the advertweets before deciding whether to introduce other payment models.
Hopefully, Twitter will make Promoted Tweets affordable for small business Internet marketers. If so, put your thinking cap on: it’s time to consider how you might harness Promoted Tweets for your business.
Without a doubt, success with Promoted Tweets will come down to the same factors that apply to other forms of search marketing: appropriate target marketing, thoughtful keyword selection and sharp copywriting skills, along with designing landing pages that convert.
