Twitter announced this week the launch of "Twitter Ads." Tweets can now be promoted through a pay-per-click model very similar to that of social or search ads. The difference is that the social relevancy of the Tweet to the key term will have a direct impact on how long, and how prominently the Tweet will be placed. This determination of social relevancy lies directly with the Twitter community. This will be measured by number of re-tweets, favoriting and volume of replies. The model is quite similar to that of Digg Ads where the number of Diggs an Ad receives determines it's placement and price per click.
Promoted Tweets will be clearly marked as such and will placed at the top of some search result pages, as shown in the screen capture below:
This is obviously a major change to the Twitter model, which finally has a revenue stream. Keep in mind that Google's paid search model nets $20 billion annually. While Twitter has a long way to go to get to that level of success with their advertising model, many feel that this is long over due.
Many believe that the delay in getting an ad model started had to do with Twitter's concern for their users being inundated with irrelevant or untimely content in their real-time searches. But Twitter seems to have found a way to do right by its users by limiting the number of promotional ads to one per key term. However, this may have an adverse effect on the smaller advertiser as key terms will start to become more expensive since the larger budgets will likely push the cost up, especially for the more popular phrases. I say more about this in a separate article written on my agency blog which focuses on Twitter Ads and how they affect Brands. You can find that article here.
For now, Promoted Tweets will only be available to established Twitter partners such as Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America. By limiting the service availability to partners at the beginning, Twitter hopes that users will be eased into seeing Promoted Tweets appear in their results before opening up Promoted Tweets globally.
