Twitter goes Google/Digg-style with Promoted Tweets
by: Bradley Wint on April 13th, 2010 at 11:16 am
Twitter, like many other social networks has joined the promotional bandwagon with the announcement of their new Promoted Tweets service. After many months of advertisers looking to gain a few clicks via Twitter through an ad medium, Twitter has finally heeded the call. The new service will allow advertisers to have their promoted tweets displayed at the top of searches. So if I wanted to advertise about a new BMW coming on the market, people searching BMW’s would most likely see my tweet in the search results, above the rest of regular tweets.
Ok, here is the full description of how it works. Twitter will be implementing their program on a phased basis allowing a handful of big named advertisers the priority to use the ad service. They will be able to submit tweets which appear at the top of search results among the other tweets. The promoted tweets will be marked, to differentiate it from the rest of regular tweets. On each search page, only one promoted tweet will be displayed. The cool thing about these tweets are that they possess the traits of regular tweets as well. They can be favourited, re-tweeted and replied to. This also means you can link to it just like a regular tweet. Unlike conventional ad services which place ads on different sections of the website, the Promoted Tweets are integrated into the regular tweet system with just a smaller notification that it’s a promoted tweet.
To measure the success of tweets, Twitter will track the resonance of each promoted tweet, meaning how well users interact with it (e.g. re-tweeting, replying and so on). Ads that are highly resonated will have more preference to be displayed and ones with very low resonance will be booted off the stream. This leads to some concern, because basically puts the advertiser at a risk. If some users are not interested in a specific tweet, it may lead them to not interact with it, automatically booting the tweet down the ranks. Also, just saying cliques were to be formed, they may choose to ignore certain ads which would lead to advertisers being screwed over. However, this idea of user ad ratings is not new. Facebook ads can be clearly rated as good or bad.
Twitter plans to implement their ads into 3rd party apps in their next few stages, allowing more presence over the network. Whether or not the app developers will benefit is not known at this time.
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