Twitter have made couple of moves those past few days to speed up their “promoted tweets” advertising program. The idea is to implement advertising in Twitter users feeds. Of course, Twitter ambitions to have advertising which will matter to users. Hence, they have committed themselves to stop the promoted tweet if it did not get enough retweets in a specific amount of time.
Now the real challenge of Internet companies which based their business model on advertising is to propose customized ads to the brand. This is what we can call market one to one in customer relationship management term. You will segment your data base into different groups which would have the same behaviour, characteristics or hobbies, and then you will be able to propose them ads that will match their needs.
Google has thrived on its abilities to connect search requests with commercial offers. Facebook is starting to do the same, and seems to move fast into getting the best of the humongous amount of users data they own.
Now the third one is Twitter. I am still wondering about Twitter’s potential in terms of advertising. Because they have never really considered a business model while their user growth era, they don’t seem to know where to go in terms of how to get advertisement into it.
Therefore, I believe Twitter remains pretty far to monetizing its great audience. Developping a tool which will analyze through tweets and determine specific groups of people is hard to do. It seems easier on Facebook, where people have let their data about location, likes, hobbies, age and so on. Basically, while you register in Twitter, you leave no data about yourself at all. And this is the reason why it seems difficult to actually get accurate data.
Of course, Google is able to do so and they don’t ask you for any data. But Google has mastered the search market, and thanks to it, it was easy afterwards to get commercial on it.
It will be interesting to see what technical solutions will be developed and how efficient/attractive it will be for brands.
