Twitter announces a new advertising scheme called ‘Promoted Tweets’

During April, the popular micro-blogging service Twitter announced a new advertising model that they hope will start earning some significant revenue for the company. Called Promoted Tweets, the ads will appear at the top of results for searches users conduct on Twitter. Eventually, they may appear in the stream of posts users see when they log into the site.

Twitter is gradually rolling out this advertising to users and there are 10 initial advertisers taking part, including Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy. The company will start by charging marketers per thousand impressions of their ads. Over time, it plans to move to a more complex model, charging based on how users interact with the messages.

Advertisers and users have been waiting for some time for Twitter to settle on a formula for ads. While the company has tens of millions of users and has raised hoards of venture capital, most recently at a $1 billion valuation, it has only recently begun to earn revenue from providing its ‘Tweets’ to larger Internet companies like Google and Microsoft.

For now, Twitter’s ad-matching and pricing formula is a work in progress, but could soon appeal to the millions of businesses who have created accounts on the service to share deals and other corporate updates. Instead of getting users to follow their messages, they will now be able to push their message to users who search any keyword they buy.

What impact this advertising will have on Twitter’s millions of users will have to be seen, however. Twitter’s Chief Executive, Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone have been publicly lukewarm about advertising, suggesting it could irritate users. They emphasised that they were exploring a range of monetisation models, including enhanced services for businesses. Advertising executives have been sceptical that Twitter could build a formula that would appeal to advertisers more than Google’s search ads or other display or banner ads.

If you’d like to know how Promoted Tweets could help the marketing of your business, please contact us for more details.

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