Twitter’s New Launch of Advertising

By Lindsey Willinger Twitter has finally announced its first step in utilizing all its users and businesses potential consumers. Twitter has about 22.3 million users which is drastically up from a year ago numbers of 524,000. Recently they released their new advertising platform called “Promoted Tweets.” This consists of a system that serves up ads based on keywords in the Twitter search queries. Twitter’s initial participants in this are Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo.

“The idea behind Promoted Tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer.

This new idea came from companies who would make tweets about promotions, products, and changes; however their tweets were quickly being replaced by user’s tweets about them. For example Starbucks publishes tweets often about their promotions but the post quickly gets lost in thousands of followers tweets about meetings.  Promoted Tweets will prevent this from happening by letting businesses insert themselves into the stream of real-time conversation on Twitter so that their tweets are not buried in the flow.

Promoted Tweets will work by users searching for a keyword in the query box, if the advertiser has bought a word that is searched the promoted message will appear in a little box at the top of the page.  Even if the advertisers post is from earlier it could still appear. The New York Times is reporting on an excellent point of this new Twitter feature. They say that this will be an amble opportunity for companies to enter conversations when there are negative tweets posted about them.

For example when new movies have their own Twitter pages often negative reviews are posted about the movie. This will give the movie a chance to oppose those views and insert positive tweets about themselves and not become lost in the sea of tweets.

The next step after Twitter finds whether Promoted Tweets are useful is to use a third party Twitter client to integrate Promoted Tweets on user’s pages. “For example, if someone has been writing posts about the Fourth of July, they could see a promoted post from Virgin America on holiday fare discounts”.

Social Media world watch out this could be an extremely useful tool in promoting yourself or business.

Information Gathered from:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/full-details-on-twitters-long-awaited-ad-platform/#ixzz0m7rqZ6jd

Twitter Has a Plan to Make Money With Ads - NYTimes.com

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