Twitter Testing Advertising Revenues by Expanding ‘Promoted Tweets’
In what could be considered as a broad indication of the growth path being chartered at Twitter, the company had announced sometime last week that it will begin testing the ‘promoted tweets’ on a limited set of twitter user pages. This will be irrespective of the fact whether the twitter account holder is following the promoted tweets’ business. While the Twitter management has been quick to mention that extreme care is being taken to ensure that the user interface is not affected, and there will be no intrusive advertising to cause customer distress, the recent move needs to be seen against the backdrop of Twitter’s plan to tap and earn a share of the online advertising industry.
It will be safe to assume that such ‘promoted tweets’ are a first step that is taken by Twitter towards garnering a greater advertising share of the online market. Until now, Twitter seems to have played a passive role as far as advertising revenues are concerned. While the paid search traffic is the major source of revenue for Google, Facebook has its own advertising model that integrates Facebook advertising in the comprehensive revenue model at work in Facebook. It was a matter of time before Twitter came up with its own version of advertising suited to the Twitter platform to try and achieve bigger financial rewards from its own system.
As part of its advertising strategy, it is quite likely that the promoted tweets would initially come from companies making mass-appeal products. In other words, consumer-oriented stuff should find a mention in these promoted tweets.
While the Twitter team has mentioned that care will be taken to show relevant and interesting tweets to the selected few, the ‘relevancy’ factor is something that needs to be talked about in a more elaborate way. For a start, the concept of ‘relevancy’ has been and will continue to be the benchmark of user experience whether is a question of organic search or the paid search. Google has been able to master the art of ‘relevancy’ when it comes to organic and paid searches and this is the precise reason that Google continues to roll over the competition with effortless ease.
Twitter understands that ‘relevancy’ will be the hallmark of the ‘promoted tweets’, and if at all the program has to expand beyond the initial testing, then they need to come up with a software code that considers all the variables of a specific twitter account, and presents him with one of the ‘promoted tweets’ that is in line with the interests of the specific twitter user. Compared to Google, this could be easy for Twitter because it has these indicators available within its own system. Twitter can easily filter-through the tweets of a user to understand his broad likes and to a certain extent his broad dislikes. And, it can study the profile of a twitter user’s ‘followings’ to further refine the likes and dislikes.
On the broad-side, Twitter’s algorithm does not need to go outside its own system to collate, and analyze the data. Such analytical ability could be created with considerable ease by the Twitter developers. And, from the looks of it, the product development seems to be working as per a plan. That is the probable reason that Twitter has decided to expand the scope of its ‘promoted tweets’ to users that do not follow the company sponsoring the ‘promoted tweets’. If you look at the timeline, the first-ever ‘promoted tweets’ went live in April 2010. And in September 2011, the platform has expanded to include non-followers to the scope. From the looks of it, the final form and shape of the ‘Promoted Tweets’ should be well clear and implemented before the end of next year.
For the business organizations, Twitter could bring a new advertising option on the table and for the investors, Twitter’s tryst with ‘Promoted Tweets’ could eventually prove a financial whirlwind. Let us wait and watch.
When are they going to make these advertising zones available to independent advertisers and affiliates?
Jay,
Twitter is currently testing with less than 10% users. Going by its past record, and the fact that April 2010 marked its first ever test on ‘Promoted Tweets’, we should be able to see some action in 2012.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks,
Andy May
Very actual information for me! Thanks a lot!
Families can also discuss what’s a reasonable amount of time to spend using Twitter and related services, since it’s very easy to get carried away.