Twitter Unveils Monetisation Strategy – Promoted Tweets

Something that might have flown under the radar for some people is the recent announcement from Twitter regarding its strategy to start making some money for its investors. So far, Twitter has been largely untapped in terms of its commercial potential over the last few years whilst people and businesses have been using this social networking tool to their benefit.

So what is the strategy?

Basically, Twitter is introducing the concept of “promoted tweets”. These tweets are short advertisements that will show up in search results that are relevant to given keywords. Advertisers can purchase keywords for a certain number of views (initially available in blocks of one thousand).

The second phase will involve showing promoted tweets in every user’s Twitter stream based upon the activity of the people that they follow. So even if you don’t conduct a search or follow the person or company making the advertisement, these promoted tweets will show up.

I’m not so happy about the second phase to be honest and I have a feeling that other users will also harbour some negative feelings against such a move. Sure, Twitter is a commercial entity and needs to turn a profit at some stage however it may create a perception amongst users that it is polluting their social interactions with potentially relevant but unwanted noise.

It will also be interesting to see how this plays out alongside Twitter’s recent acquisition of Tweetie (one of the  popular Twitter applications on the iPhone) and potential strategies on that front. Twitter could potentially crush third party development for its platform by going after advertising and client application usage.

In the short term, it remains to be seen how this will all pan out but I suspect there will be a large outcry and subsequent tabloid coverage about Twitter in the coming months.