Twitter on Promoted Tweets: "So Far, We've Received Positive Feedback"

One can only guess whether the Promoted Tweet for Toy Story 3 directly contributed to the film's blockbuster opening. To get a better understanding of Twitter's new advertising scheme, we presented a few questions to the company last week. Here are the responses. I use TweetDeck and can avoid Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. Will advertisers only be able to take advantage of these opportunities for users on twitter.com? We are currently in the first phase of Promoted Tweets. 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. This response, provided by Carolyn Penner, Twitter Communications, was nearly identical to a statement in the post of April 13, 2010 first announcing Promoted Tweets. Facebook was a more trusted site until they seemed to have, paraphrasing Twitter's statement on the ban, chosen to "optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the platform". If the Promoted Tweets and Trends are either not successful or too successful, what will keep Twitter from acting the same way? We remain focused on and excited about Promoted Tweets. 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. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment. There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. 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. So far, we've received positive feedback not only from our partner advertisers, but also from users. With the exception of the last sentence, Ms. Penner's response was also taken from that blog post and additionally appears on the Twitter Support site. Was the question answered? No really. Last week, we observed, "It is unlikely that many users read these [long Twitter blog posts about Promoted Tweets], but the posts provide a public position to which everyone inside and outside of Twitter can refer." One must respect Twitter's "staying on message," not easy for a company in the spotlight and a tactic that is bound to serve it well. We are reminded by the extreme example of the purported deal for Rainbow Media to purchase Gothamist blog site being taken down by a single wayward post that loose lips sink business plans. Toy Story 3 made a killing at the box office, yet did not climb up the Twitter Trending list to earn its place in the top ten as opposed to its "promoted" spot at the bottom of the list. Additionally, our unscientific search results show the ratio of Tweets about Toy Story 3 overwhelming those citing Promoted Tweets by a thousand to one. It is too early to draw significant conclusions from these metrics, except that Twitter should hope that the continued deployment of Promoted Tweets and Trends goes as well as the first few days.

Social Pro Daily

Twitter on Promoted Tweets: "So Far, We've Received Positive Feedback"

Neil Glassman

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Neil Glassman