Twitter’s Revenue Generation Begins Today

And so it begins. Finally! This afternoon, Twitter will begin their revenue generation through paid ads, similar to those you see on sites like Digg.

Aptly named, “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter will now be home to search-result-induced-top-of-the-page ads – bringing the attention to their promotions versus getting lost within the milliseconds of updates of who’s eating what, where and why. Later on in the year the Promoted Tweets will also show up on platforms such as Tweetdeck, however, only one ad will be displayed at any given time, plus within the stream of tweets, not just on a search result.

I’m surprised how long they actually took to put together a paid program to gain revenue, but there must be good reason… the first advertising companies to take advantage of the Promoted Tweets will be Bravo, BestBuy, Starbucks (naturally!), and Virgin America.

Here’s how it will work – Let’s use Starbucks for an example – When a word is typed in to the search box, and that word is one that Starbucks has bought, the paid advertisement will show up at the top of the tweet results screen. The post will say they are promoted by the company in a smaller font size, and when hovered over with your mouse, the promotion line turns yellow (as seen in the example below).

As with Digg paid ads, Tweeters will dictate the cost and length of time the ad appears under the advertisers paid words. Seems fair. Another way that the Promoted Tweets will be a way for companies to respond to both positive and negative tweets about their products and get star-power in their responses. Let’s say that McDonald’s comes out with a new veggie burger (did they already do that?!) and the response to it is really poor and Twitter gets filled with disgusted reviews and write-ups. McDonald’s can now (with their paid advertisement) come back and get center stage with their top of the page position with a response to the ad, giving away a coupon for a replacement Quarter Pounder with Cheese! You get the idea, right?

This will be great for Realtors all over the US to get some great exposure on another highly trafficked social networking site – keep your eye on this space for more information on your opportunity to dive into the the Promoted Tweets realm of online marketing for realtors!