Twitter announced earlier this week that the company will trial the concept of ‘promoted tweets’ in an attempt to forge a workable business model out of the service, which has so far generated little substantial revenue. But will such tweets just be spam or is there a credible marketing function to be considered?
To start with, spam-haters need not worry too much at this stage. Twitter has said they will only show ‘promoted tweets’ when you search for a particular key word a company has sponsored. So for example, a search for coffee might come up with a Starbucks sponsored tweet, but if you were talking about going for a coffee with a friend on Twitter, your conversation would not be intruded upon by a company’s promoted tweet (yet). Think of it like sponsored search terms for Google.
There are still quite a few challenges associated with this. Firstly, a lot of Twitter users tend to find people without searching for them, but through networking naturally, meaning advertising won’t be too visible anyway. If the promoted tweets were to become more visible, programmers could figure out a way to block them regardless, or use any number of Twitter applications to change the mode of viewing. The only answer is for brands or campaigns to provide content that people actually want, which many companies are already doing with customer service functionality on Twitter and investment in bloggers/writers to develop engaging content that reflects the brand but doesn’t always push the product (such as the compare the meerkat twitter feed).
It remains to be seen how this will all work, although it seems like it could be a choice between users paying for Twitter or being subjected to advertising. Either way, there is far more exciting scope for creativity and personality on Twitter than there is product placement.
Tags: compare the meerkat, promoted tweets, twitter ads, twitter advertising