Good news for the millions of tweeple that promote business on twitter, the micro blogging company announced on April 13th that it will be offering “promoted tweets” or search based paid ads. Promoted tweets will be actual tweets that appear in the search results page marked “promoted by______”. There are a few differences between promoted tweets and traditional search advertising, like those provided by Google Adwords and Yahoo Advertising. Most notably, Twitter has promised to display only one promoted tweet per search results page, along with offering an interactive format where users can retweet, respond, or favorite a promoted tweet.
So if it’s just like a regular tweet, why pay (CPM) for “promoted tweets”? According to the twitter blog, promoted tweets will stand out and won’t be lost in the sea of results. They will be a different color than regular tweets and will be positioned above or alongside search results. But before you bust out your twictionary to post promoted tweets, twitter for now is limiting access to a few businesses like Starbucks, Virgin America and Red Bull and will hopefully be offering the new platform to other businesses. We will keep you posted!
