I didn’t know how I was going to feel about Twitter advertising. It was inevitable that is was going to happen, they had to make money eventually. The main concern was how they would do it. It seemed that placing banners on the site would be the natural way to go, but since a large chunk of users actually go through clients (hootsuite, seesmic, tweetdeck) or mobile, it wouldn’t be very effective. I have to admit that I was a bit concerned about their intentions regarding paid tweets because it might just be invading people’s streams and searches in a way Twitter should never do.
Yesterday however, I came across the “newer” model of advertising on Twitter, which was genius. Instead of paid tweets, they utilized “Promoted trends” to get the message noticed. Twitter had always provided the top 10 trending topics, now they just added an 11th topic at the bottom that clearly states the word “promoted”. See the screen grab below:
This approach is not invasive at all and Twitter has announced that promoted topics have to have some traction before they are promoted. In other words, you can’t just pay them to display “Coke is best”, unless people are already tweeting about the topic. The fact that there is a box saying “promoted” next to the topic shows transparency and grabs your attention for the fact that it is in a bold color (yellow in this case).
Overall, as a Twitter user and a devoted follower of trending topics (both worldwide and local to particular customers), I applaud Twitter’s efforts at advertising. I’ve noticed that some of the comments in the blogosphere about the subject have also been positive. The only downside of this approach is the lack of targeting. Twitter is investing a lot in analytics and ways to target messages better (Analytics capabilities for commercial accounts is also a new approach at revenues by Twitter). Promoted topics just started testing yesterday, the 17th and if I were a betting man, I’d bet on the success of this approach followed by improvements like targeting and reporting.
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