When Twitter announced Promoted Tweets in April, the micro-blogging service hinted that third-party ads would soon follow. According to news reports, Twitter is gearing up to roll out the service on its new design, and prices are running as high as $100,000 for the text ads.
Promoted Tweets, and soon third-party Promoted Tweets on services like TweetDeck, aim to transform Twitter from a social-media phenomenon to a profitable company. Promoted Tweets are ordinary tweets that advertisers want to highlight to a wider group of users. Promoted Tweets are very similar to the Google paid-search model.
“Twitter has a massive third-party ‘distribution network’ among all its client-software apps,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “It flips a switch and becomes a huge global ad network that will immediately provide huge scale to Promoted Tweets. The partners and client apps will have no choice but to take the ads as part of the API terms of service.”
The $100,000 Tweet
The first phase of Promoted Tweets launched with a handful of advertising partners, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America. Twitter users see Tweets promoted by advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search-results pages.
Now that Twitter has determined that its advertising vehicle is resonating well with its members and offering value to advertisers, Ad Age reports the company is fulfilling its promise to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, some brands that initially tried Promoted Tweets, including PepsiCo and Best Buy, didn’t make new ad buys. But with comScore reporting 130 million searches on Twitter in August, the platform still has advertiser attention.
The Journal reports Twitter, which didn’t charge for the test run,…