Melissa Campanelli's The View From Here: Promoted Tweets, A Marketer's Dream?
Well, it’s finally happened. Earlier this week, after several months of buzz on the blogosphere, Twitter launched its Promoted Tweets program, a new advertising strategy that delivers contextually relevant ads in a user’s search results. At launch, advertising partners include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America.
“Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as ‘promoted,’ but in every other respect they will first exist as regular tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand,” according to an April 13 blog post on Twitter by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Users can retweet, reply or bookmark the messages, which are called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages.
Twitter is working hard to distance Promoted Tweets from other sponsored ad programs, such as Google AdWords, in my opinion. In his blog post, Stone wrote, “since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single ‘ad’ in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising.”
There is one big difference between a promoted tweet and a regular tweet, Stone said: “Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar — they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it or retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.”
A home run?
Advertisers and users are cautiously enthusiastic about Promoted Tweets, at least according to what I’ve read in the blogosphere this week.
They’re not sure whether the program will succeed, especially since corporations can already use Twitter to advertise to a targeted audience just by having Twitter followers. Why should they buy a promoted ad when they’re already interacting with customers and prospects? Others are concerned that Twitter-based advertising is similar to unsolicited email.
Two things are clear, though: One, users and advertisers are curious about the program and will be watching it closely in the days and weeks to come. And two, this program was created to generate revenue for Twitter beyond the search deals it’s signed with major search engines.
What do you think? Will you be experimenting with Promoted Tweets? If so, let us know. We’d love to follow up and do a bigger story on this.
