How Twitter Promoted Tweets Can Benefit Businesses

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Finally! Twitter is going to launch its advertising platform on Tuesday, according to The New York Times.

As expected, Twitter would be rolling out phases of the platform. The first phase of the Promoted Tweets platform is already supported by advertising partners like Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America. The tweets would appear on top of Twitter search results, but limited to one per page.

To provide a targeted audience and help advertising partners track ad performance, Twitter has a “resonance” metric that takes into account number of retweets, favorites, impressions, and clicks to make sure that ineffective ads are removed.

Example of a Promoted Tweet from AdAge:

In the words of Biz Stone:

“We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.”

How It Will Benefit Business

1. Bigger audience: Besides Twitter followers, brands can now reach out to other Twitter users who are probably interested in its brand and products (since they searched the keywords set by advertisers.)

2. Solution to flushed down tweets: Some people have criticized the point of promoted tweets when brands can already tweet for free to their followers. Besides the first reason pointed out above, brands might find promoted tweets helpful since they will come out on top of search results. No more flushing down of tweets = more impressions.

3. Resonance Measurement: Biz Stone also said, “There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.” This would definitely help businesses measure their ad ROI better.

“Clickablility” of Promoted Tweets Depends On Advertisers

Some users are not supportive of having promoted tweets in their personal stream of tweets (which Twitter would soon go into.) Even in search results, some users expressed that they would not be clicking on ads. I would understand that if we are talking about typical ads. But now we are talking about tweets that can be personal and valuable to users. Promoted tweets do not have to look like ads.

Users are able to reply to it, unlike normal one-way ads. It is also important for advertises to avoid hard selling and provide value. Starbucks has been tweeting promotions, such as free pastries, and I certainly wouldn’t mind those tweets showing up on my search results or personal stream. Contests can be created through the use of retweets, @replies and so on. Businesses could do it with regular tweets, now they can extend their reach to a bigger part of the Twitter community.

This post is based on the limited information we have about Twitter’s new ad platform. We will share our updated views as Twitter rolls out other phases in 2010.