Twitter Advertising: Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts

Twitter’s time has come to build a revenue stream. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter’s focus has been on growing its user-base, but the priorities have changed. Last week, Twitter announced it will begin offering Promoted advertising on a wider scale. Until now it has experimented with ads that target users based on the content in their tweets, or messages. In previous years the roughly $155 million venture capital funded start up operated with no revenue, but now with evaluations of over $1 billion, its time to cash in and build a consistent revenue stream.

By August of this year Twitter handled about 130 million searches according to comScore.com Inc. and serviced more than 96 million users, sending an average of 50 million daily tweets. For Marketers, Twitter’s search ability has high valued branding potential that could eventually bring in ad revenue comparable to Facebook or YouTube.

At the launch of its Promoted Tweets advertising offering in April of this year initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, Bravo Verizon Wireless, Red Bull, Sony Pictures and Coca-Cola – with more to come.  Twitter co-founder Dick Costolo previously said in an interview that the company’s ad initiatives have exceeded expectations, and that on average 5% of Twitter users who saw an ad on the service interacted with it, a rate that is ‘an order of magnitude greater’ than most online ad campaigns.

Promoted Tweets

Promoted tweets and regular tweets are not much difference. They will both be organically sent to the feed timeline for those who follow the brand. Promoted Tweets will be labeled as ‘promoted’ when an advertiser is paying. Users are encouraged to interact with Promoted Tweets in the same way as a regular Tweet including replying, retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the top of the search results page. Resonance is what keeps a promoted tweet alive. Twitter will measure the resonance or response it is getting from followers, taking into account nine factors, including, the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links.

“If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it as a promoted post. That means that the company will not have to pay for it, and users will not see ads they do not find useful.”

- Dick Costolo, COO, Twitter.

Twitter’s currently also includes promoted accounts and promoted trends as promoted advertising.

Promoted Trends

Promoted trends are similar to promoted tweets appearing on the top of a search results page. There is no difference between promoted trends and organic trends except promoted trends are marked as ‘promoted’. The promoted trends are already popular subjects on Twitter, but must make it onto the trending topics list. If they do not meet a minimum popularity it will disappear. In Twitters revenue plan advertising is paid for when it meets requirements of resonance or popularity. If the ad disappears the advertising company no longer pays.

Promoted Accounts

Promoted accounts will suggest featured accounts for you (appearing in the ‘Suggested for you’ space in your Twitter sidebar). Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games, and Microsoft’s Xbox among the first brands to sign up and user will start to see more brands featured. Users will only see Promoted Accounts when they are publicly following a group of Twitter accounts affiliated with a sponsored account. For example if you follow a bunch of people that follow RockStar-related accounts, and RockStar Games is paying to promote their official account, it will appear in your ‘Who to follow’ space on the right.