Twitter has announced a plan to begin using ‘promoted tweets’ – advertising delivered via Twitter.
Twitter, a personal mini-blog application has become vastly popular since its inception four years ago. But despite its popularity and the millions of dollars that have been invested in its development and marketing, it is still yet to provide a return for investors. Just like the paywalling of newspapers, promoted tweets are an attempt to make a profit from a new form of publishing.
Twitters plan of promoted tweets will work by having users seeing sponsored tweets on twitter search pages, having advertising on the twitter homepage that will be tailored to the user, and also through tweets directly to users.
The challenge will be for Twitter to incorporate advertising without driving away their user base. Their plan to pull promoted tweets that aren’t attracting attention will be one motivating factor that will influence the advertisers who use the service. The onus will be on the advertiser to be attention grabbing and interesting, worthy of re-twittering. This will force the advertisers to work hard to embrace the particular idiosyncrasies of the microblog.
While we would all like to keep things free, the costs of running services such as Twitter need to be paid, and a business model that can sustain the service must be found. Perhaps this is the one. Whether the users of twitter are willing to have the advertising becoming part of their tweeting experience remains to be seen.
References:
Twitter, a personal mini-blog application has become vastly popular since its inception four years ago. But despite its popularity and the millions of dollars that have been invested in its development and marketing, it is still yet to provide a return for investors. Just like the paywalling of newspapers, promoted tweets are an attempt to make a profit from a new form of publishing.
Twitters plan of promoted tweets will work by having users seeing sponsored tweets on twitter search pages, having advertising on the twitter homepage that will be tailored to the user, and also through tweets directly to users.
The challenge will be for Twitter to incorporate advertising without driving away their user base. Their plan to pull promoted tweets that aren’t attracting attention will be one motivating factor that will influence the advertisers who use the service. The onus will be on the advertiser to be attention grabbing and interesting, worthy of re-twittering. This will force the advertisers to work hard to embrace the particular idiosyncrasies of the microblog.
While we would all like to keep things free, the costs of running services such as Twitter need to be paid, and a business model that can sustain the service must be found. Perhaps this is the one. Whether the users of twitter are willing to have the advertising becoming part of their tweeting experience remains to be seen.
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment