Twitter: Promoted Tweets and Trends… They’re Heeeerrreee

Forgive me if you’ve already run across “Promoted” Tweets in your Twitter stream as they did launch in April of this year. Perhaps I don’t follow or search for enough major brands, but regardless, I’m seeing them now- largely in part because they are now testing out “Promoted Trends”. And sadly (or luckily?) its to promote something I love. The Toy Story franchise. (You may remember me talking about Toy Story and Twitter about a year ago and how Director Lee Unkrich was using Twitter to troubleshoot screenings of Toy Story 1&2 in 3D for followers.)

When Twitter first announcedPromoted Tweets, they described them as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users”. They would “be clearly labeled as ‘promoted’ when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.”

As far as functionality goes, the Promoted Tweet in question from http://twitter.com/DisneyPixar seems to be “sticky” to the top of search results (when searching that topic) regardless of its chronological entry point (Think AdSense for Google). You can get to this Tweet by clicking on the ”Promoted” Trending Topic. While I’m sure Toy Story 3 would trend naturally at some point, having an official Tweet sticky to the top of search results ensures that the first tweet people see is positive. (Which can be really good if your movie sucks and is getting negative feedback.)

Another interesting comment from the Twitter-ups back at launch was this: “There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.” This calls to mind Facebook‘s feature of “x-ing” out an ad and then asking you to provide feedback as to why you closed it off your page (which they claim to use to serve you better ads). Its a feature I like though and hopefully Twitter will stay on top of this Promoted Tweet feature to keep our Twitter streams from turning into spam boxes.

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Additional Reading:

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets: What You Need To Know

Twitter tests new Promoted Trends feature with ‘Toy Story 3′ from Disney’s Pixar

Twitter Again Apologizes for Outages, Bugs

Twitter Inserts Promoted Trends in Trending Topics

Tags: advertising, Corrie Davidson, disney, Marketing, monetization, pixar, Promoted Trends, promoted tweet, Social Media, toy story, twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 9:29 am and is filed under Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.