If you’re an avid Twitter user, you probably know how fast-paced Twitter is and have looked into several third-party apps like Tweetdeck to help you organize your tweets and keep up with your followers. As a marketer, you more than likely asked yourself how many of your followers actually see all of your tweets.
Here is where the new Promoted Tweets come in, but first, let’s briefly review the history of this paid Twitter offering. Twitter first introduced Promoted Tweets, tweets called out at the top of Twitter.com search results, last April with ten select partners. Up until now, Promoted Tweets have heavily relied on Twitter’s search volume, which was relatively low, and did not generate nearly as many impressions as Promoted Trends that serve as a 24-hour roadblock.
To provide more visibility to Promoted Tweets, Twitter is introducing Promoted Tweets in users’ timeline as BETA at the end of this month, available to a select few advertisers, including HBO and Discovery Channel. The new offering is expected to roll out to the community at large in September.
What does this mean for marketers?
Similar to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, Promoted Tweets in users’ timeline (or as Twitter calls them, “Promoted Tweets to Followers”) will surface branded tweets to the top of the user’s timeline in order to ensure that your followers catch a glimpse of the message in a fast moving pace of Twitter. Moving selected tweets to the top of your handle’s timeline will help optimize engagement with your brand’s most compelling and important messaging.
If the brand is interested in geo-targeting its paid tweets, then the regular Promoted Tweets are the way to go, but if the brand wants to reengage their followers, the Promoted Tweets to followers/within the users’ timeline, work best.
How does it work?
The Promoted Tweets will appear at or near the top of the followers’ timelines based on relevance and resonance, and like with any Promoted Tweet, advertisers pay only when a follower engages (i.e. retweets, favorites, or replies at). The number of Promoted Tweets that will appear in a follower’s timeline will be limited. Consumers will never see an organic Tweet and the Promoted version of that Tweet in their timeline at the same time. Like the regular Promoted Tweet product, the new offering is an auction-based CPE (cost-per-engagement) model.
If you’d like to learn more about the new Promoted Tweets or any of Twitter’s promoted products, let us know.
