Twitter Steps Foot Into the World of Paid Ads with Promoted Tweets
Posted by Samantha Coren
On Tuesday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a blog announcing the introduction of Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s long awaited plan to begin monetizing their business model.
Anytime a social web 2.0 platform begins to integrate ads when there was once none, there’s always backlash to be expected from the user community. How many people do you know who reacted to Facebook’s targeted ads by removing information from their profiles or even deactivating their entire Facebook account?
Luckily, it seems like Twitter has taken many steps to minimize user backlash by having user interactivity play a huge role in which Promoted Tweets get shown and which get the chopping block. Twitter dubs a new metric known as “resonance” to rate tweets for paid advertisers and select which ones will be shown as Promoted Tweets on Twitter’s search results pages. A resonance score depends on how often a tweet gets retweeted, replied to, favorited, or has a profile picture clicked on by users.
On Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog, he does a great job demystifying Twitter’s new beast and hypothesizing the impact it will have on users and advertisers. I agree with Owyang’s conjecture that Promoted Tweets are the fusion between paid and organic ads. For companies to be successful with promoted tweets, they have to pay close attention to what resonates best with users, since users will have control over the advertising inventory.
However, seeing how well content resonates with people shouldn’t be limited to paid advertisers on Twitter. Resonance trends in your content, on and off your main site, can help guide you into creating better remarkable content for your audience. Having content that triggers people to take some form of action is essential to any successful inbound marketing strategy.
How has tracking “resonance” of your content affected your company’s marketing efforts?