Twitter has found itself a business model: ‘promoted tweets.’
Similar to PPC ads, users will see paid for tweets at the top of their twitter search pages clearly labelled ‘promoted’. Biz Stone, the company’s founder, has said that promoted tweets will need to meet much higher standards than normal posts – if people do not interact with them by passing them on, they will be removed.
Industry responses: users could become irritated with them. Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum, makes a very good point summing up the benefits and potential pit-falls of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook: “The flip side of Twitter’s immediacy is that if advertising messages are not very carefully positioned, users can hit back at brands and in real time, and brands will have little control over this.”
We would recommend a cautious approach: dip your toe in the Twitter pond and see what kinds of ripples it creates… gather learnings, see what works and what doesn’t and then take the next step forward.
We will come back and see how users have reacted to promoted Tweets and which advertisers have been the best at this.
Divya