Twitter Ads
Twitter, in an attempt to draw more clients to its ad business, is making an effort to push Twitter ads to the top, not only to the top of the search results, but to the top of user’s timeline as well. This is probably annoying news to normal Twitter users, but pushing Twitter ads to the top is a great feature for businesses that implement social media into their marketing and advertising campaigns. Which is practically every major business out there today.
Twitter Ads Appear On Top | How It Works
Twitter ads will not appear at the top of every Twitter users timeline, which is great, because then the entire timeline would be crowded with ads. Rather Twitter ads will appear only in the timeline of those that follow that particular company or organization. So that means that you will still have to be searching for influential followers, and other ways to promote your business and gain followers. Twitter will help make your ads more prominent and visible, but it won’t do all of your marketing work for you.
Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner told VentureBeat, “Because users are already following these brands and because Promoted Tweets are just normal tweets, these messages are already a part of the users’ Twitter experience.”
Twitter Ads Appear On Top | Break From Form
A lot of users will be upset about Twitter ads appearing at the top of their timeline because, well, it’s no longer a chronlogical timeline that we are working with anymore. However, we users will be able to make a distinction from the Twitter ads and the rest of our stream, just as we are already able to see with Yelp and other social networking platforms that contain ads.
Whats great about Twitter ads though is that it is still going to be viable content that the user will want to see. That has always been Twitter’s approach to advertising. It will appear in the timeline, but it will still be the same format as other tweets. This keeps users from just completely ignoring the Twitter ad in the first place. And it’s proven in the statistics:
“We’re seeing incredible engagement numbers — between 3% and 5% on average for Promoted Tweets… We’ve seen some as high as 52%,” said Penner, pointing out that this stat is “orders of magnitude higher” than clickthrough rates for other types of online advertising, which typically range from less than half a percent to 1%. “That level of engagement is unheard of in the digital advertising world.”
http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/28/twitter-promoted-tweets-timeline/
Twitter Ads Appear On Top | How ROI Is Calculated
Twitter ads calculate their ROI in a different way than traditionally done, so lets take a look at that as well:
Twitter defines engagement as a clickthrough, but it also counts retweets, replies and favorites in its engagement numbers — meaning that part of the ROI includes one-on-one conversations with fans of the brand. That kind of engagement is what could someday soon make Twitter a true contender — along with Google and Facebook — for the ad budgets of major international brands. All it needs now is the massive userbase of a mainstream web application. The startup is tackling both components of that goal (consumers and big brands) with two key hires announced this week.
So with brands like Best Western, Dell, Gatorade, Groupon, HBO, JetBlue already in the mix with Twitter ads, why would you sit around and miss out. Check out what Twitter ads can do for you!