Twitter Announces Advertising Platform
April 14, 2010
Twitter announced a long-awaited and much-anticipated advertising model earlier this week. What does that mean for restaurants? Well, unless you are Starbucks, not much in this early rollout phase. Twitter will use brands such as Red Bull, Virgin America and Sony Pictures to test out their Promoted Tweets ad platform. Here’s the scoop:
Early on, the test advertisers will be able to promote their regular tweets to the Twitter community. Initially, these promoted tweets will show at the top of Twitter search results. For example, if a member searches for “Starbucks,” a promoted tweet from the coffeehouse chain may appear at the top of the list of search results. Twitter assures users that ads will be organic tweets and will provide added value and relevancy for both users and advertisers. Here’s a mockup of how the ads may appear when launched:
After some testing, Twitter plans to have promoted tweets appear in users timelines as well as in partner and client applications. They promise users that all promoted tweets will have to meet very stringent guidelines, including a “resonance factor.” If a promoted tweet doesn’t resonate with the Twitter faithful, judged by retweets, replies and favoriting, the promoted tweet will be pulled from display.
Peter Kafka of MediaMemo liveblogged at a followup presentation by Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the AdAge Digital Conference yesterday, where Costolo offered up more details, including the ability for advertisers to assign specific keywords to specific tweets they’ve published previously. The promoted tweets will stay at the top of the search stream. The pricing model to begin with will be cost-per-impression, however once they dial in the resonance metric, the pricing will move to an ROI model. During a Q&A session, Costolo revealed that at some point the ads will include the location as part of the platform, possibly offering nice opportunities for local-store marketing.
It’s expected that more details will emerge at the Chirp Conference, the Twitter developers gathering held today and tomorrow in San Francisco. Needless to say, TwoTables Internet Marketing for Restaurants will keep you posted as more information becomes available.
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