It looks like Twitter has worked out a new platform that will allow it to generate a significant amount of new income: promoted Tweets.
The idea is similar to Google’s paid ad platform, in that paid-for Tweets will appear in search results. Small text at the bottom says that the Tweet has been paid for.
However, the promoted Tweet is not sure to stay at the top of results for long. It has to have a certain amount of resonance with the searchers, and if it doesn’t get replies and clicks, Twitter will pull it.
Unlike in Google’s paid search results though, only one ad will appear at a time.
The model will contain two parts. The first is that the promoted Tweets will appear in search results, and the second is that promoted Tweets will start appearing in user feeds, on both Twitter’s own site, and any third party site that uses Twitter’ feeds (ie. Google). These feed results will show promoted ads for keywords that a user may not have searched for, but will be targeted towards users who likely have an interest in the ads’ general topic.
Twitter’s first advertisers have been Starbucks, Bravo, Best Buy, and Virgin America. The platform works by advertisers bidding on a certain keyword on a cost-per-thousand basis, and in the future, the hope is that advertisers will be paying for their ads based on the lift in resonance over a standard Tweet.
The company has reportedly been testing the ad platform internally for the past few months, and now the ads are being rolled out slowly to see how users respond to them. Says Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer, Dick Costolo, “We want to get this right. We don’t want to force a model on people that is based on incorrect hypotheses.”
This platform marks Twitter’s second income generator, after data fees from search engines who pay to index Twitter in real-time search results. Next up will be ‘professional accounts’, which will allow multiple users to access the same account, along with brand tracking and, of course, integration with promoted Tweets.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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Tags: promoted tweets, Twitter
