Do promoted Tweets produce more revenue for advertisers?
Twitter works faster and better than any news service. Word gets out and is passed along to millions of people while a reporter is still collecting information. Twitter does much less well at delivering ads because that real-time strength pushes paid messages off screens at a rapid rate.
To address that weakness and move closer to social commerce, Twitter has launched a pilot program to give fixed prominence to Tweeted ads, called Promoted Tweets.
For example, if the Acme Co. is launches a BOGO offer at midnight with a Promoted Tweet, that message will still be still be near or at the top of the Twitter list when the consumer logs in that morning, noon or night.
Better value for the advertiser? Maybe. Twitter can say that it delivered 100 percent of paid Tweets because all users will have seen them.
Does that translate into more revenue? That has more to do with the quality of the message. If the offer has value or is clever enough to attract attention, then people will click on the link.
If the offer goes viral, it will be re-Tweeted, which again is a measure of the quality of the message, not how many people saw it the first time. A free Re-Tweet is also a better deal for the advertiser than a Promoted Tweet.
Right now, Twitter is tweaking the program with select clients such as Groupon, JetBlue, LivingSocial, Microsoft Xbox, Red Bull, Sephora and Starbucks. They are likely to promote limited-time offers that can be passed along.
How well would those and other companies do using their Twitter account to reach core customers and ask them to get the word out?
