So finally Twitter has decided that it may be a good idea to make some moolah. By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the new ad platform that will bring Twitter out of the red and start bringing in the green, but if not, here’s the synopsis taken from the Twitter Blog:

What are Promoted Tweets?

“We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”

What’s going to change for the average user?

“You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.”

This last part insinuates a sort of “resonance” score, which everyone that works with PPC advertising will recognize as a quality score. Brands can bid on terms, their brand’s tweets show up in the search when those terms are used, fairly straight forward.

On the day that this was announced, I went to Twitter.com and something peculiar happened; on the main page (pre-login) there was a term, “Haiti,” autopopulated in the search field. I logged in and was taken to a search results page for “haiti” with a Promoted Tweet at the top for a human rights non-profit that was not on Twitter’s list of first-round big-brand Promoted Tweet companies. Not sure why this happened, and nobody that I talked to about it had experienced the same thing. If you’ve seen the same autopopulating of the Twitter search field on the main page, leave a comment!

In other Twitter news (we can’t get through a Social meeting at work without some game changer being released literally as we speak), both Google and The Library of Congress will be archiving tweets for public consumption. Google’s “Replay” is very fun to play with, and you can search any date range or drill down to an individual minute to see tweets about that topic. This is great for businesses releasing products or news, holding events, or any other imaginable reason you’d want to gather sentiment around a very specific time frame. Taken from the Google Blog:

“Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.”

Also, as I mentioned, Twitter “donated” its tweets to the Library of Congress, who must have felt that they really didn’t have enough spam (alright, only 70% of Twitter, or whatever the amount is) on file. Google Replay is much more interesting and accessible.

Again, if you’ve come across any Promoted Tweets, post ‘em down below in the comments!

Tags: google, promoted tweets, replay, twitter

This entry was posted on April 15, 2010 at 8:50 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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