Promoted Tweets are Twitter’s Ads

Today is the day Twitter starts making money. Fortunately there’s nothing to worry about because the service is going to continue being free for us to use but sadly our enjoyment could be interrupted by the appearance of various adverts. That’s right. Twitter has finally recognized that it is missing out on a massive chunk of revenue and is making a mistake by resting on it’s laurels of relying on investitures. These ads will be known as Promoted Tweets.

Initially Promoted Tweets will only appear on search results accessed via Twitter’s website before slowly encroaching onto the homepage as the year passes. Even users of third party applications will see the PTs.

These ads will appear as fully-interactive tweets. Only one will be displays atop search results or on the homepage or in programs such as TweetDeck at any one time and each PT can be replied to, favorites or reteweeted. I’m not sure why you’d favorite an ad personally. But replying to a PT you’re genuinely interested in establishing some form of communication with could very well gain you some correspondence. It’s authentically useful for both Twitter and the user.

Another reason why Twitter users shouldn’t be too disappointed regarding PTs? They could lead to a more stable platform. If Twitter begins rolling in the money they may update existing servers or install extra space. Hopefully this’ll lead to less appearances by the fail whale and more tweeting.

Twitter’s COO has announced that, ‘we are not in a rush to make a certain amount of money this year. We want to get this right. We don’t want to force a model on people that is based on incorrect hypotheses’. So Twitter is aware these ads may have a negative effect.

Personally I may find them annoying but it’s just one ad and it could lead to improved stability!

How dear the cost is to display a specific advertisement will depend on how high the level of user interactivity reaches. If a PT gets replied to and retweeted a lot it’ll cost more. If everyone ignores it like I’ll be doing it’ll cost less.

It’s of fundamental importance that those of you reading this understand the fundamental concept of keyword-based advertising. PTs displayed on your homepage, search results or third party applications will be relevant to what you’re tweeting about or searching for.

Twitter isn’t stopping with PTs in terms of financial gain. While the social-networking-cum-micro-blogging platform continues to experiment with streaming ads in the form of interactive tweets developers may also take a deeper look into commercialized accounts. Companies who wish to gain access to a specialized dashboard to keep an eye on the tweeted opinions of their products or services will have to pay for premium accounts. Hopefully this will include a few PTs in the price.

Twitter may also charge search engines like Google to display real-time tweets in search results.

Keep your eyes peeled on Twitter’s website search feature to see the first ad sometime today.

Peace,

Steve :)