April 13, 2010 by Andre
Twitter has announced that it will allow advertising on the site for the very first time in the coming weeks. The social networking site had previously not had any form of advertising on the site, but they appear to have developed a way to ‘Twitterfy’ the use of adverts on the site.
Advertisers will be able to purchase “promoted Tweets” that will appear on search result pages on the Twitter site. Twitter seem keen to underline the fact that they will not be regular internet advertisements, they must “resonate with users” and become a part of their conversations according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
As would be expected a few big names have already signed up to be a part of the promoted Tweets service, including Starbucks and Sony.
As not to go from having no adverts to completely overloading the site with them only one Tweet will show up on each search page, but we will see how long that lasts.
This is Twitter’s first move in the direction of profit making, previously the company has not made any money, only now are they starting to do deals to raise revenue.
Promoted Tweets is only the first step in Twitter’s overall advertising plan, in the future they hope to include the promoted Tweets in a users stream of posts rather than just on the search page.
Twitter seem to be following a similar path to Facebook, no adverts at first, then the allowance of just a few, surely it will not be too long until each page is flanked by ads offering bigger muscles, compensation for injuries and strangely high paying jobs.
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