New Advertising on Twitter
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Twitter declared Tuesday that it will be introducing advertising by allowing companies to pay to have their messages show up first in searchers on Twitter.com.
"Promoted Tweets" debut comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.
The new ads will apparently won't bring in much money during the experimental phase. Virgin America one of the advertisers is one of few who are invited to test the new concept. The best part is they won't be paying for the demo.
The airline's vice-president told Michael Liedtke of Business Week that they expect to change to a paid model in the future.
Twitter hasn't commented on the decision but other than Virgin America, Twitter identified Best Buy Co., Sony pictures and Starbucks Corp. among others using Promoted Tweets.
The site has 69 million people worldwide used Twitter last month. They site has been valued at $1 billion.
The tweets are to be "called out" as ads on top search results on Twitter. Twitter users will see the new ads when they search broadly for topics being tweeted about.
However, a large number of users don't use these search options on Twitter. Many programmers have written mobile and desktop software that can access the feeds of Twitter messages that users get from people they aer following on the site.
