Twitter’s Social Search Ads
Marketers wanting to be heard over the over the rabble in social media may soon have a new tool to capture more attention. On Tuesday, Twitter announced the launch of its first ever advertising program, Promoted Tweets.
The micro-blogging network will show promoted tweets at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages, essentially making the tweets a form of paid search advertising. The tweets look and act as normal tweets, but are clearly labeled as promoted by an advertiser.
This “first phase” of the ad platform is only open to a handful of advertisers, such as Best Buy and Starbucks, and is helping Twitter “get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value,” according to the announcement’s blog post (linked above).
I personally assume a self-service, keyword-targeting ad platform will eventually be offered to a broad range of advertisers–but time will tell. For now, Twitter says they hope to later expand Promoted Tweets beyond their search tool, bring them to other partners’ spaces and into Twitter users’ tweet timelines.
This is yet another case of social media and search engine marketing finding common ground, this time in the area of paid search. Yesterday, we published part one of our two-part social media and SEO special report, which outlined five key trends in social and SEO marketing integration. Stay tuned for part two next week which will feature specific tactics.
Hopefully this announcement will be the first of many which help Twitter grow as a powerful marketing channel. My head is already spinning with different ways sponsored tweets can be tested to increase clickthrough rates and response.
What does this announcement mean to you? What else do you think is on the way?
Categories: Search Marketing, Social Networking Evangelism Community, Viral Marketing paid search, social media, Twitter
Thanks for blogging about Promoted Tweets. I’m trying to get a little more information. Did Twitter say when they’d open up Promoted Tweets to other companies? I definitely want to kick the wheels.
Hi Adam:
I am intrigued by the idea. Sounds very exciting.
Do you know of any stats as to how many people use Twitter search for a service? Or, is it somewhere on the Twitter site that I don’t know of yet?
Thanks,
-Deven