Twitter Bets on 'Promoted Tweets' to Raise Ad Money

After Twitter's recent acquisition of Tweetie, it became clear that substantial changes were on the social network's horizon. And today, the site confirmed this by announcing its platform would now support special paid advertisements from specific companies.

Known as 'Promoted Tweets,' the ads, according to co-founder Biz Stone's TwitterBlog, "are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users." What this basically means is that users will soon see special Promoted Tweets pop up at the top of their Twitter search results, which were, of course, purchased by clients. Advertisers can buy certain keywords from Twitter, and guarantee that whenever a certain word is searched, their tweet ad pops up. As the New York Times reports, Stone eventually plans to roll out an ad scheme that embeds Promoted Tweets directly into a user's tweet stream, and will select the ads based on how useful a particular individual might find them.
The service will launch today for anywhere between 2 to 10-percent of users, and will cater to an initial list of ten clients, including Starbucks, Best Buy, Virgin America, Bravo, Red Bull and Sony Pictures. Time will only tell, then, how successful Promoted Tweets are for businesses and for Twitter, and, most importantly, how seamlessly they fit into Twitter's stream of consciousness data flow. Stone insists that the service is an "easy" and "non-traditional" common sense solution to monetizing Twitter. We certainly understand that it needs some sort of plan to stay above water, but we just hope that it doesn't lose sight of its ethos along the way. [From: TwitterBlog and NYT; via: HuffingtonPost]

Tags: ads, biz stone, BizStone, business, microblogging, monetization, money, socialnetworking, targeted advertising, TargetedAdvertising, top, twitter, twitter advertising, TwitterAdvertising, web