Twitter has launched its much-anticipated ad program, as the micro-blogging platform looKs to turn its growing popularity into profit. The new service, named “Promoted Tweets,” will allow companies to place a less-than-140-character message at the top of pages of search results. Twitter said that it was currently testing Promoted Tweets with a number of advertisers […]
Twitter has launched its much-anticipated ad program, as the micro-blogging platform looKs to turn its growing popularity into profit. The new service, named “Promoted Tweets,” will allow companies to place a less-than-140-character message at the top of pages of search results.
Twitter said that it was currently testing Promoted Tweets with a number of advertisers including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America. Under the program, one “Promoted Tweet”, such as a sponsored message from Starbucks, will appear at the top of a search result page on Twitter for keywords that companies specifically purchase from Twitter.
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Biz Stone, Twitter founder, was keen to point out that promoted Tweets will only be used if they are regarded as relevant by users.
“There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users,” Stone wrote in his blog. “That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.
Josh Bernoff, an analyst with U.S. marketing research company Forrester Research, estimated the new ad service could provide Twitter with 100 million U.S. dollars a year in revenue.
Twitter, on which users can send short text messages called “Tweets” to “followers,” has become one of the most popular social networking services on the Internet since it was launched in August 2006.
But the San Francisco-based company has been slow to add a money-making aspect to its service, while it has received tens of millions of dollars from venture capital firms since its launch.
So far, the company has not released figures on its number of users. However, market research company comScore said the website had 22.3 million unique visitors in March in the United States, up 140 percent year-over-year.
Read Biz Stone’s comments on Twitter’s new ad program on his blog here.
