Twitter has recently announced its plans to allow
advertisers to promote their tweets onto other websites and apps. This,
in effect, would turn their advertising platform into a complete network
for posting advertisements across the Internet.
Twitter are not undertaking this venture alone. The firm is launching the new service in partnerships with Flipboard
and Yahoo Japan. The advertisers with promoted tweets will allow a
company to pay the firm to insert a tweet in other users’ timelines, and
they will now be able to pay extra to push their content onto the other
two websites entirely.
Ameet Ranadive explains,
“Let’s say Nissan is running a Promoted Tweet campaign on Twitter, but
also trying to reach similar audience on a mobile application like
Flipboard. Through this new partnership, Nissan could run a Promoted
Tweet campaign on Twitter, with specific creative and targeting, and
simultaneously run the campaign off Twitter, with the same targeting and
creative in the Flipboard app. He continues, “Best of all,
because Flipboard already integrates organic Tweets into the app, the
Promoted Tweet will have the same look and feel that is native to the
Flipboard experience.”
There are pros and cons to this new move.
On the one hand there is the potential to expand the reach of Twitter’s
promoted tweets, thereby possibly making them more valuable to
advertisers. On the other hand, Twitter also runs the risks of
undermining the uniqueness of their service.
By promoting tweets on other websites,
Twitter is asking advertisers to give up on real-time in favour of
evergreen content. Is it that different from how they operate the site
anyway? Does this mean that Twitter has eventually figured out how to
increase the average revenue per user without increasing the number of
ads on the site? Time will tell.
[Image via cunningplanmarketing]
