This morning word broke about Twitter‘s first steps in the area of sponsored content. With Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Best Buy, Starbucks, Virgin America and Bravo among its first players, the communications company will slowly roll out the program, Promoted Tweets, by first running sponsored Tweets only in keyword searches. Later, the ads will show up in user streams, though how that will look is yet to be explained. If nothing, this progression will be pensively watched, studied and tested before being accepted as the answer.
Here’s an aggregated look at what’s been printed on the subject thus far:
-“‘The idea behind Promoted Tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,’ said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer.” –NYT
-“Users will start to see tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages.” Twitter’s Sean Garrett told Reuters.
-“The ads will let businesses insert themselves into the stream of real-time conversation on Twitter to ensure their posts do not get buried in the flow.” -NYT
-In a Q/A on the Twitter blog, founder Biz Stone answers the question: “What else do you have planned?” He responded: “Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.”
-“At first, companies will pay per thousand people who see promoted posts. Once Twitter figures out how people interact with the posts, it will figure out alternate ways to charge advertisers.” -NYT
-Razorfish’s social guy Shiv Sing breaks it down: “Companies can buy search result terms so that their chosen tweets appear at the top of the page when a user searches for that keyword. So for example, if I were to buy the keyword ‘television’ every time a user searched for television, he’d see my ad. My ad wouldn’t be like a Google Adwords customized advertisement though. It would be a previous tweet of mine that I would have selected to appear as the ad for that search term. The promoted tweet would be clearly labeled as a promoted one and wouldn’t get lost in the stream as time passes. It’ll stay at the top of the page.” Click here to see why he likes this platform.