Twitter Confirms First Phase of Promoted Tweets

by Lucy Griffiths on 17th June 2010

Real-time network Twitter has revealed plans to expand on its promoted tweets feature, having encouraged a handful of commercial partners to get involved in the first phase of development.

On its support site, the company confirmed that browsers and link building clients will start to see entries in their results list that appear to be popular trends, but is actually purchased advertising space and will be labelled as such on the rankings page.

However, these posts will retain all the features of conventional messages so that users can send them on allowing people to reply, retweet or select as a favourite.

Furthermore, Twitter has said it is keen to gain an understanding both the value to advertisers and people on its network before moving on to the next stage of the project.

The first such promotion to catch the online community’s attention is Disney Pixar’s marketing of Toy Story 3 and, although Greg Sterling told Search Engine Land readers that the film is being talked about anyway, this post would be "very effective" and generate lots of discussion.