Twitter has said it will allow advertising on its site for the first time. The social networking site said advertisers would be able to buy “Promoted Tweets” that will appear on Twitter’s search results pages.
Twitter is yet another digital business in search of a business model. Currently, the world’s Twitter users tweet about 50 million times a day 600 times a second.
Twitter’s management hopes to apply the Google advertising model to its own micro-blogging service. A paid Tweet here, a paid Tweet there, and the deluge of the Twitterfall should deliver some healthy income.
Commercial tweets to build brands and create buzz are probably the most promising application of Twitter ads. It describes the Promoted Tweets as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to a wider group of users”.
Initially, Promoted Tweets would only appear in Twitter search results, the company said, and only one Tweet would show up on each search results page.
It follows Twitter’s announcement over the weekend that it will buy Atebits, the developer behind iPhone application “Tweetie”, which is one of the main user access points to Twitter.
Risks
“There is a risk that users may get turned off by too much advertising”–Christine Overby, vice president at Forrester Research
This raises the possibility that if Promoted Tweets prove unpopular with users, rival application developers may offer products that filter them out.
“There is a risk that users may get turned off by too much advertising,” says Christine Overby, vice president of interactive marketing at research company Forrester.
“Advertisers are accustomed to ‘pay per click’ or ‘pay per thousand’ [advertising units] models,” she adds. The advertising and Tweetie moves are not the first revenue-raising initiatives by Twitter – in October the company announced tie-ups with Google and Microsoft’s Bing under which the two search engines pay Twitter to include Tweets in their search results.
Twitter’s latest initiative is the first phase of its advertising plans. In future, Promoted Tweets will appear in users’ stream of posts, not just on Twitter search results pages.
Unsurprisingly, Promoted Tweets soon appeared as one of the most talked about topics on Twitter.
Source: BBC.CO.UK
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