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2011

PROMOTED TWEETS; NOW ON USER’S TIMELINES

July 29, 2011 0

Twitter till now had their promoted tweets advertised only by making them appear on the trend list of Twitter. But Twitter is changing the trend for good as one would soon see that their timelines would have sponsored messages. The company terms this form of advertisements as ‘timely tweet’. This is however restricted to viewing advertisements from organizations and brands which are being followed by the user. This advert service is not compulsory for the Twitter users as they have the free their timelines from these advertisements which would require just one click from their end.

Twitter is currently on to ramp up its activities for commercial purposes and it is to even open an office in London for advertising sales which is on hand. This was noted when the company made an announcement on its official blog. The blog post said that the company was on its way to introduce a way which ensures that the tweets which are very important relating to an organization reach the user, if they are following that organization. The post further states that the ‘timely tweets’ would reach the user directly as it would be placed near the top or at the top of one’s timeline.

There would be a ‘scroll down’ option even for these ‘timely tweets’ as it happens for one’s tweets. However it would be restricted to just one tweet per appearance.

Twitter is currently in the testing phase for its users as this new offering would have only a few groups of Twitters partners which would have promoted tweets for their followers. This rolling would be for a couple of weeks before it is out for each and every company. The current groups of partners include Virgin America, TNT, Summit Entertainment’s “50/50”, Starbucks, Sephora, Red Bull, Microsoft Xbox, LivingSocial, JetBlue, HBO, Groupon, Gatorade, Dell and Best Western. There would be a few more who would be included to the list soon. There is however even a possibility that one might see ‘timely tweet’ which would be from non-profit organizations which one follows. The current list of non-profit organizations includes Water.org, The American Red Cross, Room to Read and Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Twitter has not been into advertising on its social networking site for a span of four years. Last year it had introduced itself to the world of advertising and had given the users an option to come up with promoted tweets. This may be one of the reasons because of which Twitter has not been able to make it large all over the world. For the time being, its been a US-based marketing plan for Twitter majorly.

This is a unique option adopted by Twitter which might be informative at times for the users and sometimes it might be frustrating. But the possibility of the latter is quite less as one would follow a brand or organization if they want to be linked with their updates. And if still they do not appreciate this form of adverting, they have tan option to remove the ‘timely tweets.’