Back in May, Page One partner Craig Oda noted that Twitter had banned “paid Tweets” and in turn rolled out its own marketing service, Promoted Tweets.  Twitter founder Biz Stone described Promoted Tweets as just the first phase of the Twitter advertising model. Simply, Promoted Tweets are company-sponsored Tweets that are listed first at the top of certain search results on Twitter.com, and are clearly marked as “Promoted.” Brands like Starbucks and Virgin America were the first to utilize the new service.  For example, when typing in “Virgin America” in the Twitter search engine, this Virgin America-sponsored Tweet is listed first:

Phase Two of the Twitter advertising model rolled out this month – Promoted Trends.  Once dominated by every Justin Beiber reiteration imaginable, the trending topics list will now incorporate topics sponsored by a company that will also be marked as “promoted.” Disney/Pixar was the first to try this new phase, by promoting “Toy Story 3” as a trend in advance of its June 18^th opening.

Last week, a clever campaign from Coca Cola demonstrated the potential of the Promoted Tweets model when executed well. The beverage brand capitalized on the World Cup fervor and “bought” the hashtag #WC2010, which was listed as a Promoted Trend on Wednesday, June 23 – the day of the U.S. vs. Algerian match and possibly the best (and most Tweeted) game in U.S. soccer history.  When Twitter users clicked on the #WC2010 Promoted Trend, a Promoted Tweet from Coca Cola with a soccer-related message and a link to their website appeared at the top of the search results. From this one-two Twitter punch, Coca Cola reported an impressive 86 million impressions and a 6% click-thru rate in 24 hours (via @mashable).

Twitter is very vocal about the fact that the evolution of this advertising model will be a slow one – heck, it took them two years to get to the Promoted Tweets idea.  But I can already see two places for improvement:

- Incorporating Promoted Tweets into broad searches: I could only find the Virgin America Promoted Tweet when searching for the phrase “Virgin America.”  I think Promoted Tweets would be of more value to companies if their Promoted Tweets were featured on broader searches – in this case, words like “Vacation,” “Airplane,” or “Travel.”

- Reaching TweetDeck users: In its current state, the Promoted Tweets model seems to skip over those Twitter users who use an external client, like TweetDeck or Twhirl, and don’t see trending topics (promoted or otherwise) on their interface. In searches for “Virgin America” on both clients, the Promoted Tweet from Virgin America did not appear.

At the Conversational Media Summit on June 8, Twitter COO Dick Costolo reported that Twitter now has 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day. Clearly, Twitter is an untapped advertising goldmine.  However, I think that the Twitter advertising model has a way to go before more companies, especially those that are small-to-medium sized, see the benefit. With the flexibility of millions of advertising dollars, corporations like Disney, Starbucks and Virgin America are the perfect guinea pigs.

Tags: brand marketing, Coca Cola, Disney, Pixar, Promoted Trends, promoted tweets, social media, Twitter, Virgin America, World Cup

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 12:55 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.