Twitter begins the trial of posting advertisements on individuals’ streams or timelines, whether they follow the marketer or not. Twitter slowly make changes to the way they advertise. Based on the article Twitter Begins Publishing in Users’ Streams by Edmund Lee:
Showing an advertisement within the stream of any Twitter user is a significant change, as some users may see it as a disruption or even an intrusion into their typical Twitter experience. CEO Dick Costolo told Ad Age in April that the company would be looking at possibly selling advertising into a user’s timeline in the fourth quarter of this year, though he cautioned it would happen slowly. “Is it great in search and horrible in the timeline? We are going to test and test and test,” Mr. Costolo said at the time.
Twitter’s other ad products also started out with a smaller segment of users. Promoted Tweets, for example, initially appeared on searches on Twitter.com, and the company only recently allowed third-party Twitter readers such as HootSuite and TweetDeck to display these Promoted Tweets, for which they also got a cut of the revenue. Advertisers have also been buying Twitter’s other ad product, Promoted Trends, which show up at the top of a list of trending topics on Twitter.com. This list is generally seen by a smaller segment of Twitter users, as many use third-party clients, not all of which show the trend list.
The new timeline ads are said to function as an extensions of Promoted Tweets which are targeted by keyword. Those ads only appear at the top of searches; the new ads will scroll by as a normal tweet would.
Of course not everybody will be in favor of this change, some users may find this ads disruptions or spams, but on the other hand it’s another way to enhance the publicity of the products and services the marketers’ offer.
