It is never easy to create a new advertising medium. Some might seem more obvious than other ones, especially for traditional media. Now, for social network, the task is not so easy.
Of course, on Facebook you could have some advertising like display ads, or keywords ads. But it would not make the best out of the media. Indeed, you are not going to get the wonderful potential of conversation enabled by those social media.
Twitter has been looking for quite a long time a way to monetize its service. And to be honest with you, I have been sceptic about their strategy. First, their constant technical failure makes the service unstable. But also, I was questioning the fact they have never thought for the longest time how to become profitable.
Nevertheless, couple of months ago, Twitter have set up their advertising program, named “promoted tweets”. The idea is quite original: placing promoted tweets into users’ search results, which would be related to their points of interest. The idea is that the best the advertising it, the most retweeted it will be. Hence, you have the resonance effect, when people are retweeting your ads, and therefore, you may have a strong buzz out of it.
A recent study has been conducted to analyze the first results of such campaigns. And it seems quite promising:
Promoted Tweets are on average retweeted 50% more time than a regular Tweet. Some specific cases went even up 200 to 300%.
One of the main interest is that it gives to the brand clear data about campaign results. Indeed, you may know how many times your promoted tweet showed up, how many people clicked on it, and how many times it has been retweeted. It is therefore easy to have a clear view of campaigns efficiency.
Now everbody are waiting for the day when Twitter will insert some promoted tweets into users’ threads. It might be disruptive, but I believe it will be necessary to secure Twitter’s profitability.
