Twitter’s expected “promoted tweets” program will put ads on Twitter for the first time, beginning with search results and later in user feeds both on Twitter.com and third-party clients that access the service, such as TweetDeck, twhirl and TwitterBerry.
As planned, a single ad will appear at the top of a Twitter search results page, itself displayed as a tweet. Users can “re-tweet” the ad to pass it around, make the ad a favorite or reply to it.
Twitter’s first advertisers are said to include Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America.
Initially, advertisers will bid on keywords on a cost-per-thousand basis, but Twitter is developing a performance model that could be the basis for pricing based on a metric called “resonance.”
That metric would assess retweet activity, how often a tweet is marked as a favorite or how often a user clicks through a posted link.
Twitter says there will only ever be one Twitter ad displayed at a time. As one example of how it might work, Starbucks might ask: “Tell us something a barista did to make your day?”
Twitter apparently plans to introduce the program slowly, to minimize any potential user “blowback.” During the roll-out, Twitter will study how resonance works and will decide in the fourth quarter whether, or how, to take ads beyond search and into user Twitter feeds.
The promoted tweet is one of three streams of revenue Twitter will have available, including a data fee from search engines indexing Twitter in real time, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the coming “professional accounts.”
Professional accounts will include the ability to have multiple users on one account — much like some of the clients such as CoTweet do today — plus a dashboard that shows what’s happening with a brand on Twitter and integration with promoted tweets.
