Twitter to introduce ‘promoted tweet’ ads

Twitter is planning to step up ‘promoted tweet’ technology, according to Financial times.

The project aims to generate more income from its paid advertisements by allowing advertisers to show promoted tweets to users based on the people and brands users follow.

The California company Twitter plans to use this information to allow advertisers on the micro-blogging website to display what it hopes will be more relevant messages, Shiva Rajaraman, Twitter’s product manager, told marketers at the Ad: tech conference in London on Tuesday.

“Who you follow is a good indicator of what you are interested in,” Mr Rajaraman said. “As we move forward, we are going to implement targeting mechanisms that allow people to engage their audience in that way. We are starting with essentially keywords but the basic goal is to build out interests based on who you’re following.”

Mr Rajaraman said that the system was still at an experimental stage and that Twitter had not yet approached advertisers to sell targeted ads. Users’ personal details will not be shared with advertisers, he added.

Twitter, which is more than four years old, has only begun to commercialise its product in the past few months. April saw the launch of “promoted tweets”, which show brands’ messages when people search for particular keywords.

Early adopters of this system have included Walt Disney, which shared tickets and video clips of its Toy Story 3 film, and Coca-Cola, which said it saw “phenomenal” results by sponsoring tweets related to the football World Cup.

By moving towards advertising targeted to users’ interests, Twitter is following the lead set by its largest rival, Facebook, which allows companies to show advertising to people based on the brands and products that they have indicated they like.
Millions of people follow brands on Twitter, with Whole Foods, Dell and Jet¬Blue among the most popular. With its new targeted ads, Twitter could allow Hewlett-Packard to promote its tweets to people who follow Dell, for example.

Rajaraman said that Twitter would not sell lists of usernames to advertisers, and that as with its existing system, only tweets that resonate, meaning they are replied to or shared by many people, will be promoted.

Separately, Twitter had to patch a security flaw on Tuesday that affected thousands of users.

Users rolling their mouse cursor over certain links would see pop-up messages and in some cases links to pornography. The virus could then access users’ accounts and post links without their knowledge, causing it to spread rapidly.

Twitter said the problem had been “fully patched” by early morning, pacific time.