14 April 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Twitter launches Promoted Tweets

Twitter bosses may have finally found an advertising model allowing them to capitalise on the success of the microblogging site, as the first Promoted Tweets have begun appearing in real-time search results.

Despite Twitter's explosive growth into the mainstream, with around 50 million tweets being made each day by users, the site has thus far failed to really commercialise on its success, despite heavy third-party investment and its profitable search deals with web giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

With Promoted Tweets, Twitter may have found its ideal advertising model, allowing businesses to insert eye-catching tweets into search results, as demonstrated below (courtesy of Twitter user Richard Nevins and TwitPic):



Mashable reports that Promoted Tweets will initially only appear in Twitter's own search results, but will subsequently be rolled out to third party applications such as TweetDeck and Tweetie. Among the customers confirmed to be using the service at its first stage are Virgin America, Bravo and Starbucks.

The advertising model will initially allow advertisers to bid on keywords on a CPM basis, before the company develops a more advanced 'resonance score' metric determining the reach and impact of individual sponsored tweets, factoring information such as favourites, re-tweets and view counts into its decision.

Promoted Tweets have been compared to sponsored links in search engine results, as well as the similar Digg Ads service, which also factors user interaction into its pricing and longevity decisions for ads.

Even with this new trend of commercialisation, Twitter is evidently still committed to providing the best user experience possible, and has stated that it will wait and see how its new advertising model is received by the Twitter community before expanding later in the year.

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