If you are a user or advertiser on twitter, then Twitter’s recent efforts should be of interest to you. Twitter has settled on an advertising approach and expects great things from “its "promoted" advertising products.
Twitter has been working on its monetization plan and is now taking steps to implement it.
Twitter has been testing a number of different advertising options this year. In April it launched “Promoted Tweets.” Promoted Tweets offered advertisers a means to have their regular Tweets appear at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. The paid messages are labeled “promoted.”
In June it added “Promoted Trends” by adding Promoted Tweets to its list of trending topics. Trending topics lists the most talked about topics on the site at any given moment. The bottom of the list included a link to an advertiser’s marketing promotion or product.
Promoted Tweets and Trends were followed in July by the ad supported @EarlyBird Twitter feed. The @EarlyBird Twitter feed offered daily, special time-sensitive promotions from advertisers.
Twitter has also done other things to make it more advertising friendly. These efforts include a redesign of their website and the planned introduction of an analytics dashboard.
The new and improved Twitter homepage was designed to make it a more logical place to advertise. Dick Costello was quoted in Information Week as saying that “The new Twitter provides a richer, more compelling environment for businesses and customers to engage in conversation.”
The dashboard, expected to be available in the fourth quarter, will help users and advertisers understand how tweets spread and who is spreading them.
Dick Costello, Twitter's Chief Operating Officer, finally announced the results of Twitter’s efforts to select an advertising platform at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference in New York at the end of September. Their money-making strategy will be based on the “Promoted Tweets” platform.
The new "Promoted Accounts” platform will allow companies to pay to be included in Twitter’s “Who to Follow” lists. Users will be targeted based on their interests and Twitter activity for all of the “Promoted" advertising feeds.
Twitter announced as well that it will be phasing out the @EarlyBird Twitter feed in favor of the “Promoted” approach to advertising.
Advertisers will pay Twitter when users interact with the promoted advertising. Mr. Costello said at the announcement that people click on the link, forward the post to friends or reply to it 5 percent of the time, based on their experience to date.
Twitter will also introduce a self-serve advertising system sometime next year that will make it easy for small businesses to take advantage of the Twitter advertising platform.
With these advertising products in place, Costello predicts that Twitter's advertising revenues will increase at a similar rate to those of Google and Facebook.
I wouldn’t bet against that!
What do you think?
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