After four years of twitting around, the phenomenon known as Twitter has buckled down and unveiled what appears to be the first phase of a business model. They are calling their new revenue building endeavor “Promotional Tweets.”

According to company Founder Biz Stone, “Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.” These paid Tweets will be clearly marked as “promoted” and you can expect to see them at the top of some Twitter.com search page results. There will only be one Promoted Tweet located on a search results page at a time.

Stone states that, for the most part “Promoted Tweets, other than being labeled as ‘promoted,’ will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow the brand.” Just like any other Tweet, Promoted Tweets can be replied to, favored, and Retweeted.

Despite their similarities in look and function, Promoted Tweets must meet a higher standard. Promoted Tweets have to resonate with users or they will disappear. Twitter is measuring this by how much users are replying to it, favoring it, or Retweeting it.

People were beginning to wonder when Twitter was going to unveil a business model. Stone mentioned on Twitter’s Blog that they took their time, because they wanted to “optimize for value before profit.” The value that they have built with the Twitter brand could be the key to the Promoted Tweets’ success. Now that Twitter has proved to be a valuable player in today’s social media craze, with millions of users, advertisers now see Twitter as a valuable place to reach and connect with their desired audience(s). Hopefully this simple service will prove beneficial to all parties involved: Twitter, its users, and advertisers.

For more information on Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, check out Twitter’s blog post at http://blog.twitter.com/, titled “Hello World”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *