With a lot of hubbub and some fanfare, Twitter rolled out their "Promoted Tweets" program today, i.e. advertising.
In articles from AdAge and The New York Times, the Promoted Tweets platform will enable businesses to inject their messages into the Twitter stream without getting lost in the constant stream of information. The service rolled out first with search results, and will later, according to reports, enter both Twitter.com streams and third-party apps such as TweetDeck and Tweetie, which was snatched up by Twitter last week.
Also according to reports, only one ad will be displayed at a time.
Brands that are involved in the program at the outset include Virgin America, Bravo and Starbucks.
The way it'll work is that advertisers will bid on keywords based on a CPM basis. Later, however, Twitter plans on launching a “resonance score” metric that will judge how much reach and impact individual sponsored tweets have, based on favorites, retweets and views.
So far, as Mashable pointed out, the strategy does seem to be similar to Digg's, where user interaction with ads is usedto determine the price and longevity of specific ads.
The program is just underway and will be rolled out through the rest of the year. However, Twitter plans on monitoring how users react to the program.
This will be an interesting program to watch especially if users loath the intrusions. Will Twitter walk away from money on the table because of user complaints?
I doubt it. This would equate to newspapers saying they don't care about advertising dollars.
This will be a big wait and see game. One thing will be certain, however, is if Promoted Tweets work, be on the look out for other real-time advertising opportunities where social media channels like Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, etc. will start to offer brands real-time advertising opportunities and real-time content sponsorship programs.
Basically, all the real-time information consumers are enjoying, reading, digesting, etc. is no longer a consumer-owned space. The success of Promoted Tweets could change all that.