After the successful launch of promoted tweets in April, Twitter has now decided to go ahead with a new service that should help them further increase revenues.
The new service has been incorporated in their trending topics feature and is known as ‘Promoted Trending Topics’.
The first such promoted topic is for Disney / Pixar’s movie, Toy Story 3.
Promoted trending topics are clearly highlighted with a yellow box that says “promoted”. When a user clicks on that topic, a search results page is shown with the advertiser’s promoted tweet at the top, followed by “Top Tweets” that Twitter selects based on the number of retweets and then other users’ tweets about the topic.
The promoted tweet in the search results could contain link to pages with more information, just like any other tweet.
Even though promoted trending topics are placed near the bottom of the page at present, the yellow box is bound to attract some attention, especially while it’s new. Twitter might have to bump up the promoted topic ads in the future, once users get used to seeing it and start ignoring it.
Promoted trending topics will appear irrespective of the location to which the trending topics are set. One condition that has been set for the continuation of the promoted trending topics is that they must resonate with Twitter’s user base. If they do not attract sufficient attention, they will disappear just like any other trending topic.
While Twitter continues to claim that promoted tweets and promoted topics are not “advertisements”, it is rumoured that promoted topics are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars!
