What do Twitter users actually think of its new advertisements? A poll by me

Posted: April 14th, 2010 | Author: Chris Norton | Filed under: General Twitter | Tags: advertising, Twitter Advertising | 2 Comments »

Unless you have been hidden under a large rock you will have noticed that Twitter launched its Twitter’s new advertising platform yesterday, Techcrunch described it’s offering as follows:

• The new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.
• Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored.
• A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.
• One ad will be shown at a time
• Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo
• Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets

Following yesterday’s big announcement, I sent out a couple of tweets asking Twitter users what they actually thought of the fact it was going to insert advertisements into Twitter searches. I wanted to hear what people actually thought and whether it would bother them at all.

From the responses I got it seems people don’t mind the occasional sponsored tweet here and there. We all seem to accept that it needs to make money in some way or another. However, I can’t see this strategy working that well in the first instance.

Google’s Adwords thrives because people are searching for a specific thing and the sponsored links bring the searcher to that thing quicker. Twitter on the other hand isn’t really a search engine. Also I have a couple of other questions:

1. How many users actually run a search?
2. How often do users search on average?
3. Are the numbers going to be high enough for it to all work out mathematically?

It will undoubtedly make more money, as it is making very little at the moment, but whether this is the Holy Grail to social network success I am not so sure. If you think they are safe because they have good traffic levels, go and check out Friends Reunited or more recently MySpace and Bebo which might be actually closing.

In short, Twitter needs to get it right but I think this strategy will need adjusting – what do you think of Twitter ads? Here are some of the responses I received from my tweets:

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• Twitter places launches but breaks everything else causing major outages
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• Five cool ways to add tweets to your blog

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