Twitter, the popular microblogging service that has experienced rapid growth over its four years of existence, has launched its first attempt at advertising in an attempt to monetize its significant traffic. Called “Sponsored Tweets,” Twitter’s monetization plan will feature messages from these companies at the top of search pages and eventually within users’ feed of messages on the service.
The sponsored messages will have a significant additional value proposition for advertisers, because users will be able to “retweet” them to their groups of followers on the service, increasing the reach and authenticity of the ads significantly. The first advertisers will include large national brands like Starbucks, Red Bull, and Best Buy,according to the company. Additionally, the sponsored messages will be tracked very closely by Twitter, and if the advertisements are not “resonating” with their audience (measured by click-throughs, retweets, and users saving the tweets) they will cease running.
Twitter’s advertising model is innovative and uses the native functionality of the service that made it so popular. Instead of more traditional advertising options, such as the display and pay-per-click advertisements used by other social networks and search engines, Twitter’s advertising will be built into the way the user interacts with the service. In this regard, Twitter’s advertising model begins to resemble radio broadcasting in its integration with the content users want, with the added social factor of users being able to send the advertisements directly to their friends.
The results of Twitter’s initial trials will be closely watched, and the advertisements won’t hit critical mass until they are released into the third-party clients where it’s estimated that 60 to 70 percent of Twitter users actually access the service. But Twitter’s new advertising model appears to hold very good things for both the company and businesses who want to use the service to reach target customers.
