Twitter Finally Monetizing: CEO Says Promoted Tweets a Win

Posted by: Mike Pallante on November 2, 2011 at 3:31PM
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At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo remarked on Twitter's first move toward monetization, the Promoted Tweets feature.

“That thing is working better than we could have ever hoped,” Costolo said.

Twitter's Paid Ads Are New

Until 2010 Twitter, though a massive social network and household name, was not a monetized platform, meaning they actually produced no money. Last year they rolled out Promoted Tweets for a small number of advertising partners. The Promoted Tweets show up as top results in Twitter's Search function.


Recently Twitter has experimented with inserting "Promoted Tweets" into user's timelines. In addition to Promoted Tweets, Twitter has rolled out Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends and has absorbed some 3rd party analytic tools to offer to their advertisers.

Has Paid Advertising on Twitter worked?

Well, early in October, during Advertising Week in New York, Twitter debuted their Advertising Blog. In their very first blog they claimed that their advertisers were experiencing an engagement rate of 3-5% per campaign, which according to Twitter is leaps and bounds above campaigns on other networks.

Are Advertisers Using Twitter?

Yes. Twitter began their Promoted Tweets feature with only 6 advertising partners. Now Twitter boasts over 1600 advertising partners and growing.

At the Summit, Costolo indicated that future advertising ventures on Twitter would be unobtrusive. Unlike sites like Yahoo and CNN.com, which plaster obnoxious and unavoidable movie trailers and advertisements over the entire page, Twitter will simply be working with the timeline and watching closely to find what type of advertising turns users off.

What Questional is Asking

Will Twitter learn from Myspace and Facebook and take a "less is more" approach to advertising and monetization? Myspace fell off due to massive site bloat and Facebook, while still showing every sign of growth, takes a lot of pubic flak for their information mining practices.