Los Angeles — Things are looking better than ever for Twitter as it seriously mulls about how to make money on its service and experiment with advertising, has on Monday announced that it has initiated experimenting with the next phase of its “Promoted Tweets” introduced earlier this year into the Twitter user timeline via a test using Hootsuite, Twitter said.
Barely a month after new chief executive Dick Costolo took the company reins, not only are the user numbers still climbing, interestingly, the site is introducing in-stream advertising.
Later, the company says, Promoted Tweets will be available to a wider audience, and users will begin to notice tweeted advertisements in their streams, from brands like Virgin, Starbucks and Red Bull. Twitter client and social media dashboard HootSuite is Twitter’s sole partner in this new advertising experiment. Twitter will be testing this form of advertising among HootSuite’s 900,000 users, before trying it out on Twitter.com. They simply want to get it right before they roll it out to everyone.
“When we introduced Promoted Tweets in April, we described our plan for gradually rolling them out in all of the places people experience Twitter: first in search on Twitter.com, later in search through our partners, and eventually in the user timeline,” spokesman Matt Groves noted in a blog post.
“As we have done since the commencement of our Promoted product efforts, Twitter is taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach to this test,” says Graves. “We are carefully looking at how Twitter users react to and engage with Promoted Tweets in the timeline. We want to display Promoted Tweets in a way that is both useful and authentic to the Twitter experience.”
“During this trial period with HootSuite, we will analyze with where and when Promoted Tweets are shown in the timeline,” adds Graves. “Not all HootSuite users will see Promoted Tweets and those who do may see different Promoted Tweets in different places in their timeline. As with Promoted Tweets in search, we will display Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they are relevant.”
Here is a first-look screen-capture of what those Promoted Tweets in a user’s stream on HootSuite look like:
And in the timeline:
Visually, the Promoted Tweets in the timeline appears identical to a regular tweet, complete with a profile image, text, links and hashtags. The main variation appears to be a “Promoted by” tag at the end of the tweet, naming the ad sponsor behind the tweet.
The new in-stream ads will be algorithmically determined, thus, we employed several signs to establish a Promoted Tweet’s relevance to a user, including the types of people and products a user follows. “You will see Promoted Tweets [in your stream] which closely match your interests, or you would not seem that at all,” HootSuite says. The company will take a cut of the ad revenue, the specifics of which are “in progress,” says HootSuite chief Ryan Holmes.
Interestingly, in May, Twitter’s then chief operating officer, Dick Costolo, mentioned that the site would have hundreds of advertisers by the fourth quarter. Costolo accepted the CEO position after Ev Williams stepped down in October.
Holmes says his company, which also assisted in experimenting Promoted Tweets and Trends, saw “high usage” as well on those products. “We allowed some of our paid users to opt out of Promoted Tweets and Trends, but have seen very little opt out,” Holmes says. “It appears to be highly used and getting good traction.”
Twitter’s audience has now ballooned to 175 million users, as described in a New York Times profile of co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams. This figure indicates that Twitter has added 30 million users in less than two months, with 145 million the number quoted at the beginning of September. Since April the site has gained 70 million users.
Twitter is now on the verge of hitting the 200 million user milestone by the start of 2011, which would be a huge achievement for a site many people dismissed as being too geeky for the mainstream. Two-hundred-million users would surely be enough to put that viewpoint to rest for ever.
However, not all Twitter users will see the promoted tweets, and Twitter will display the ads only to those users where the tweets are “relevant,” Graves said. “We will expand the rollout only when we feel we are delivering a high-quality user experience,” he wrote.
Furthermore, Twitter has been introducing some advertising efforts in recent months, but they have been very intricate and very underplayed. Unlike Facebook and Digg, Twitter knows it needs to keep its user-base on side at all costs if it is to succeed in the long-term. Which makes its latest play a little risky.