Twitter in the marketplace

In an earlier blog post I talked about how business are not taking advantage of social media platforms for marketing their products and services. Twitter has recently announced that it is building a new campaign for advertising on Twitter.

There are pros and cons to the new Promoted Tweets monetisation scheme.

Firstly, the pros.

Initially, promoted tweets will be based on search queries on the website. This means that ordinary social twitter users don’t have to see the ads that they have no interest in, but should they be interested in seeing the latest ad news from one of Twitter’s clients searching for it will bring up their latest ad.

Like with Google’s sponsored links, the ads will be indicated that they are paid for. Also, only one ad will be shown – presumably the one that is most relevant to the keywords in the search string.

Now for the cons.

Twitter is planning to insert ads into your Twitter stream eventually. This will mean that Twitter will be searching your Tweets for keywords that pertain to advertiser’s keywords and those adverts will be displayed on your homepage.

TechCrunch reports that this might not be well received by Twitter users; reason being that you would be receiving information without having searched for it, and despite not following the company.

However, I can’t see that this will be much more of an irritation than being told that the first listing on your Google results page in a sponsored link. Either you use it or you ignore it. The other advantage of matching keywords to advertising is that you won’t be seeing irrelevant information.

If you’ve Tweeted about Christmas specials and your local shopping centre Tweets you their store opening times I can’t see how that will be too inconvenient.

Furthermore, the Twitter ads open up a whole new world for advertisers and companies to hear what their clients will have to say about their products or services. Promoted Tweets are just like any other tweet – they can be retweeted and replied to. So if you think something is good, or bad, you can respond to it in the same way you would any other Tweet.

Growth market

Twitter has taken some time to build up significant growth. But it is now reporting that it gets 300 000 new users a day and 180 million unique visitors a month. Frankly, with this kind of penetration on a relatively new social media platform it would be ridiculous for businesses to neglect it.

Twitter is proving itself the place to be for pretty much anyone with access to the internet. It’s a great way to find out about pretty much anything. Promotional Tweets only really ensure that businesses get their latest offers into the Twittersphere instead of relying on tweets between users.

The idea, as long as it remains as ‘organic’ as CEO Evan Williams has inferred that it will it won’t be a big disruption to social Twitter users.

But, if Promotional Tweets begin taking up most of your Twitter stream – speak truth to power because is easy enough to complain in the ear of digital, online social media.  


Many thanks to ~Ilse for the cute pic. Visit her Flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilse/