“Promoted Accounts” Continues The Commercialization Of Twitter
Twitter has just added one more mechanism to commercialize its service. Unfortunately it will also further pollute your stream. “Promoted Accounts,” introduced this week at the IAB’s Mixx Conference in New York by Dick Costolo, Twitter’s COO, allows an advertiser to appear in a user’s “Who to Follow” list.
“Who to Follow” launched a few months ago as a way to serve up suggestions for who a Twitter user should follow based on algorithms that analyze a user’s interests. Now, in addition to those suggestions, a Twitter user might see another user on the list who paid for the privilege of being there – even though Twitter will use the same algorithms to make sure the advertiser is “relevant” to the user.
The Promoted Account joins the “Promoted Tweet” and “Promoted Trend” advertising products recently introduced by Twitter. With a Promoted Tweet, an advertiser pays to have a tweet show up at the top of a list when a user does a Twitter search. Promoted Tweets are selling for upwards of $100,000 each, according to The Wall Street Journal. A Promoted Trend is added to the Trends list. When the user clicks on the trend, the advertiser’s tweet appears as the first listing. Both Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends use the word “Promoted” to designate that they are paid ads.
A Promoted Account is a subtle form of advertising, to be sure, but it has the ability to stick around longer than a Promoted Tweet – and be more obvious than a Promoted Trend. A Promoted Account resides on the Who to Follow list without a time limit.
For Twitter, the three “Promoted” advertising products are necessary to fuel revenue growth. Twitter was recently valued at around $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, but “Twitter executives says their ad push has just begun and they are under no pressure to show revenue growth anytime soon, so long as users continue to flock to the service.”
Early results with Promoted Tweets have been good, however; Twitter reports that only 5 percent of users who see a Promoted Tweet interact with it. That might decrease sharply as users become more savvy to this type of advertisement. There is also the question of a backlash from users who are already having a hard time filtering their content from spammers who have begun to populate Twitter.
As for the Promoted Account, here’s what some pundits think about it. Peter Kafka writes on All Things Digital:
“It’s easy enough to see how [a Promoted Account] would appeal to an advertiser, assuming they saw value in a robust Twitter following to begin with. (And if individual users want to boost their follower count for other reasons, Twitter will sell them the service, too.)”
David Zax of FastCompany sees the dual appeal of the new offering:
“Promoted Accounts have the potential to be the advertising gold that Twitter has been searching for – a potential win-win for advertiser and user, since the former could wind up building more business than they could from a single tweet, and the latter are less likely to be irked by tweets and trends on topics that don’t interest them.”
Twitter, like Facebook, continues to grow impressively. In fact, Twitter just ranked ahead of MySpace to become the third largest social networking service in the world, according to new data reported by comScore Inc. Facebook and Microsoft Windows Live Profile are numbers 1 and 2 respectively. Twitter had close to 96 million unique visitors in August, an increase of 76 percent over the same period last year, while MySpace fell 17 percent to 95 million unique visitors for the month.
That kind of growth makes Twitter increasingly attractive to major marketers. With Promoted Accounts, Twitter adds yet another marketing product to its arsenal, and it is likely that more will come.
