Posted By Industrial Web Solutions Marketing Team on July 13, 2010

Twitter announced back in April that it had begun to roll out its ‘Promoted Tweets’ advertising platform “with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.”  “Promoted Tweets,” states Twitter, “will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.”

For all intents and purposes Promoted Tweets “are ordinary tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.” What makes this service different from traditional search advertising models is “all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets [with] not a single “ad” that isn’t already part of Twitter.” To maintain broadcast control, Twitter “will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. This applies to a stream that may be user based, search based, or other.”

Another aspect of the service is ‘Promoted Trends.’ Working much the same way as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends refer to conversations, called Trending Topics, that are being discussed on Twitter but that may not have made it onto the Trending Topics list yet. Twitter will place paid Promoted Trends initially at the bottom of the Trending Topics list to help them to garner some attention and traction. When a user clicks on the Promoted Trend he will be able to Follow it, Retweet it, and Reply to it. All the while he is reading or interacting with the tweet, a persistent Promoted Tweet will appear at the top of his page.

In my next post I will discuss how industrial marketers can get the most out of Twitter and its new advertising services once they become available to everyone.

Categories: Technology, content targeting, industrial marketing, mobile web marketing, online marketing, professional networking, search, search network, social networking
Tags: industrial marketers, industrial marketing, Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets, social media, social network marketing, trending list, twitter