Twitter Launches “Promoted Tweets” Ad Model

Yesterday, Twitter announced on their blog the anticipated launch of advertising on Twitter that they are calling “Promoted Tweets”. Digital marketing experts have been wondering for a long time whether Twitter would announce something like this and it has finally come. This initial phase of promoted tweets will be used with just a handful of selected beta companies (like Starkbucks, Sony Pictures, Best Buy and others).

From a Pharmaceutical marketing perspective, this offers an interesting opportunity for pharma advertisers already engaged in the Twittersphere. The key thing to consider about this new Twitter advertising model is that these are not specifically like traditional advertising platforms. Promoted tweets will be specifically highlighted within Twitter search results, but they are still organic Tweets that would already exist. What I mean by that is that these are Tweets that already exist (or would exist) without the Promoted Tweets platform. An advertiser identifying the tweet as a promoted tweet simply escalates and highlights that Tweet to a wider audience.

How Promoted Tweets Will Work

For starters, Promoted Tweets will follow the same guidelines as any other Tweet – meaning the ads will have to fall within the 140 character limitations. For those wondering, that should be sufficient space to seed an adequate message. Search marketers are used to dealing with fewer characters (95 characters on Google adwords plus 35 characters for the URL without the benefit of shortened URLs). Tweets identified as promoted will be displayed within Twitter search results pages and will be highlighted to identify those tweets as promoted. Promoted Tweets will use something akin to “Quality Score” used by search engines for their paid search advertising platforms. Tweets that don’t have a high level of engagement (favoriting, replying or retweeting) will automatically disappear from the results over time.

This just launched today so don’t have a lot of insight just yet. As it evolves I will be sure to post updates.

Promoted Tweets are LIVE

Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.