Virgin America will be one of the major consumer brands to trial the long awaited advertising platform from Twitter, known as Promoted Tweets.
In what will probably be the hot story of the week in social media and tech circles as Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams and chief operating officer Dick Costolo officially unveil the ad platform at the Chirp Twitter developer event in San Francisco.
Promoted Tweets is Twitter’s first proper foray into the advertising marketplace and follows years of speculation as to how the company will make money and pay back some of the $160 million in funding so far.
The company’s only existing major commercial agreements come courtesy of the live search deals with Google, Bing and Yahoo, all of which were signed in 2009.
So what about the new ad platform?
Co-founder Biz Stone says the first phase of Promoted Tweets will see messages already in the Twitter ecosystem (in other words: existing tweets) displayed at the top of Twitter Search results but only if they match relevant keywords.
Here is an example from Starbucks, one of the other companies revealed by Twitter to included in the pilot (others include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull and Sony Pictures).
Pic from AdAge
Each message – similar to PPC ads on Google et al – will have signage to indicate that it is a paid-for message.
Messages will not be static creative modules – every tweet will have the usual Twitter functionality included, such as Retweet and @reply.
Stone says on the Twitter blog:
“We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.”
One of the ideas behind the project (apart from a way to make some money for Twitter) is to allow brands to chime in on the Twitter conversation around particular topics.
For example, if users are discussing holiday breaks around the a particular period of the year, Virgin America might serve a tweet promoting fares across the country.
This sounds simple in some respects, but there are two major factors at play here:
- Do users want that apparent intrusion if they are following a topic in Twitter Search? [NB: Twitter says it hopes to included the ad functionality to desktop clients such as Tweetdeck and Tweetie at a later date]
- What kind of pressure does this put on the advertiser to make sure their existing tweets are always have the potential to be relevant.
Take a snapshot of VirginAmerica’s recent run of tweets and ponder how many of them might be useful to other users in Twitter Search?
What this means is that brands on the Promoted Tweets service that previously used Twitter as a communication platform with customers may be forced to rein in that style in favour of more marketing-led messages to populate the system with relevant Tweets, perhaps putting their number of existing followers at risk.
Build it and they will come – the advertisers that is. Life is a box of chocolates – bite one and see what brand oozes out.
There is no way out – if it benefits the consumer then its acceptable – if it’s just another obnoxious way to enter my life without forewarning – then Twitter will become a neon sign that lights up the sky – only.
Thought there would be more comments on this. Yup, good article Kevin. In answer to your two main queries I think Twitter users realise there has to be a revenue stream for those billionaire-to-be lads at Twitter (Twitterionaires?). I don’t think people will mind promoted ads or tweets – they’re used to them in gmail etc. Long as it’s clear they are ads….
You can see why PPC seems their best option (just look at Google’s ad revenues) however part of the reason adwords works well for SMEs and travel companies especially, is its ease of use and its free analytics reporting functionality – wonder if Twitter have worked that through; so many advertisers (and users) use a client like tweetdeck etc. Would say ad functionality for those desktop clients is almost essential before they start? Maybe that’s just me. I’m probably not the only one who’s tried to put ads on Facebook/Yahoo and thought why can’t it be as simple as adwords. Not an insurmountable issue though.
As for style of tweeting, and a potential change in companies tweet-policy, I wonder if there’ll be a dual approach: re-tweetable ads and existing tweets. Probably – I reckon most bosses will be loath to invest in more marketing tweeters till the mighty dollar starts rolling in – they’ll just see it as an extension of an adwords buy I suppose. That way you cover the most bases at a minimum cost without much extra employee cost or time. Or am I being a bit cynical.
Also, and this might just be me, not too sure if advertising in the midst of a twitter storm or major event is a great idea. Could go all wrong oh so very quickly…..Makes me shudder.
However it’s all about cost of acquisition and what the bounce rate is like for advertisers (suspect it may be quite high) and if pax will accept that’s the cost of “free” tweets. Think they will.
Furthermore I think Twitter’s ad revenue expectations are fairly conservative over the next few years and if Twitter did go public there’d be a lot of people queueing up to buy shares….
Cheers Stu