Why Twitter’s Promoted Tweets are a Feature Disguised As Advertising

Yesterday Twitter announced they are rolling out Promoted Tweets to all their users including you, me and every other tweep. Their plan is to role out this new advertising model after at least a year of testing with numerous brands and the interesting thing is: they’re presenting it as a feature.

Twitter’s head of revenue Adam Bain told Techcrunch:

We’ve found that 20 to 40 percent of users follow one or more brands on Twitter. Users want to be updated when brands have updates or exclusive content. The one problem we’ve heard from users is that when there is exclusive content or deals, there’s a chance they might miss them. If the brand tweets at 9 AM, and the person comes in at 9:15 AM, they’ll miss them.

Promoted Tweets are pretty simple to grasp. Advertisers pays Twitter to have one or more of their tweets “promoted” or put in the timeline of users that are following their Twitter accounts. You read that right, users will only see the Promoted Tweets made by the brands they already follow. Not only that, but Twitter will measure 9 factors in determining if a tweet is effective as well as offering a link that you can click on to make the Promoted Tweet disappear from your timeline.

Feature for the Users, Benefit for Advertisers

Sounds good? The concept is actually quite appealing from a user’s point of view. Here at .Me we can’t wait to be able to try out Promoted Tweets, and here are 5 reasons that could make us create a Twitter advertising campaign as soon as we can:

• Only your current and potential users will see the Promoted Tweets so they’ll know how buy a domain name from one of our registrars, for example;
• By following our official .Me Twitter profile, users are basically opting in to getting the most interesting news we can offer them – they will want to see a deal or know about how to get a .Me domain in our development program;
• You can create small, targeted campaigns that last for a couple of hours but offer maximum engagement from the users, which for an advertiser means better budgeting and less longterm overhead;
• Unlike Facebook, where users come to talk to their friends and look at photos, Twitter users are there to tweet and communicate fast so they expect brands to tell them stuff they want to hear: deals, product news, promotions etc. They feel free to talk (or tweet) with a brand and using Promoted Tweets, we can keep the conversation going;
• Tweets are just… natural. Formatted for Twitter, they can be retweeted and don’t seem like normal ads. Its our job to make them interesting enough for tweeps to like them, which is just fine if we can iterate them fast. Oh wait, we can 😉

Promoted Tweets are basically featured tweets that advertisers pay. shown only to the users who “opt-in” by following their favorite brands. Twitter could have just added featured tweets as an option, but instead they’ve created a wonderfully interesting advertising model that appeals to advertisers as well as users. Promoted Tweets, the advertising model that’s a feature advertisers will pay and not a bug that users will hate. We can’t wait.