Twitter is four years old and as yet hasn’t made much money. Not the best business plan you might imagine, however, it’s the potential that counts. Right? Twitter’s first move into the realm of ‘making money from advertising’ will come in the form of promoted tweets.
Many companies already use Twitter as a communications platform and now they will be able to tweet promotions, offers, new products etc. in a truly commercial way (i.e. it will be obvious to all that these are paid for ads). Some companies have already paid celebrities to endorse their products via Twitter. Paris Hilton is the best example of a ‘celeb’ who gets paid sometimes to tweet about a brand/product/service.
The newly-announced ‘promoted tweets’ will appear in Twitter’s search results and later in user feeds and also on most of the third party clients that access Twitter e.g. TweetDeck and TwitterBerry.
The first advertisers to sign up to the new service are Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America. These companies are already avid Twitter users. Twitter currently handles over 50 million tweets a day. The ads will be rolled out slowly, “to see how users react to them,” said the company.
Twitter is also trying to make money from data fees from search engines indexing Twitter in real time and from its proposed ‘professional accounts’ i.e. company accounts that allow multiple users.
Only time will tell if the ads put users off the service. Any company looking to promote themselves via Twitter will have to know the few golden rules, chief amongst them, if you aren’t useful, no one will follow you.

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