Look out, Twitter users: More advertising is coming to your Twitter stream, even from accounts that you don't already follow. Twitter announced Tuesday that its Promoted Tweets program is expanding to "a small number of users," and a Twitter help page explains where those ads might appear: At the top of relevant search results pages on twitter.com. In search results for a Promoted Trend. Users' "home" timelines. Official Twitter clients. Third-party Twitter clients. Promoted Tweets have been around since April 2010 and an expected backlash never seemed to materialize. Ori [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Features: General | Top News | Twitter: Advertising | Twitter: Business Issues

As it continues to develop the advertising opportunities available on its service, Twitter is now allowing brands to target their promoted tweets to followers only. Like other promoted tweets, the messages appear at the top of users' timelines upon login, and scroll down afterwards. They can also be dismissed immediately. The company announced the new feature in a blog post today. "Traditionally, you could target with a set of keywords and restrict to geographies," Kevin Weil, the product lead for Twitter's monetization products, told me. "With this, you can target to your followers -- a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Features: Analysis | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising

That self-serve advertising platform that MediaPost got a look at? Well, Twitter is denying that it's the self-service platform it plans to roll out this year for long-tail advertisers, according to a report in ReadWrite Web. "Reports that Twitter is testing a self-serve ad platform are inaccurate," the company's PR folks tweeted this afternoon. "We plan to test our self-serve ad product later this year." The interface viewed by MediaPost, which Twitter reportedly said was part of its Promoted Products offering, lets advertisers buy promoted tweets and promoted accounts. Twitter told Rea [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising

Twitter has just launched an expanded version of its online guide for business users, which opens up its previously limited/closed advertising products and lets anyone put in a request to buy ads on the service. At the same time, it also represents a significant step for the company in terms of offering a formal and cohesive suite of products for the business community. In a nutshell, Twitter is saying, "We're open for business." The new site, which is available at /business.twitter.com, is simply called "Twitter for Business." It appears to have some of the same content as the Twit [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising | Twitter: Business Issues

In a first ever move, Google is now carrying ads from someone else's ad network -- Twitter's, as Google integrates Twitter's new Promoted Tweets into Google Realtime Search. It's quite a coup for Twitter. Not only did the company get Google to pay it for its data last year ($15 million, it's rumored), something relatively few publishers have done, but Twitter's earning in a second way from the ads that are now appearing. Promoted Tweets: Twitter's AdWords Promoted Tweets are a way that advertisers can make their tweets show above all others on Twitter itself, when someone searches the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | Google: AdWords | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising | Twitter: Business Issues

Watching Twitter roll out its ad-related products is almost like watching paint dry; it's a very slooooow process. That's to Twitter's credit, perhaps, as the company is obviously being painstakingly delicate about introducing advertising into the service's ecosystem. Today, another small step: Twitter says it's testing Promoted Tweets in the main Twitter timeline. But, of course, they're doing it slowly and with some caveats: The test is only happening for users of the HootSuite Twitter client. Only some HootSuite users are part of the test. Here are the details from Twitter's blo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising

As was rumored last week, Twitter has formally introduced its latest advertising option: Promoted Accounts. Promoted Accounts will show up in the "Who to follow" section of a Twitter home page, and is fully algorithmic in deciding when and which promoted accounts to display. According to the company's announcement, what and when you might see promoted accounts being suggested depends on who's advertising and who you're following: When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. [...]

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If you're looking to grow your Twitter following, it might help to have your name and avatar show up when Twitter shows logged in users "Who to follow" on Twitter.com. And sometime soon, you'll be able to pay for that exposure. It's the latest offering in Twitter's ongoing efforts to help users find new accounts to follow and find new followers. Speaking Tuesday at the IAB Mixx conference, Twitter COO Dick Costolo said the company will launch an advertising service called "Promoted Accounts." According to the WSJ's recap of Costolo's comments, Promoted Accounts will "allow advertisers to pa [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising