Friday, August 05, 2011

Twitter advertising platform: first year valuation

One year ago Twitter launched promotion and advertising tools – namely Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts, the first being ordinary Tweets paid for by advertisers in order to reach a wide group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers, the second consisting in time-, context-, and event-sensitive trends promoted by advertisers which appear at the top of the Trending Topics list on Twitter, marked as Promoted, and the third working as “Suggestions for You”, i.e. suggestions for accounts that people don’t currently follow and may find interesting.

What’s the balance of this first year of offering? 600 marketers have taken advantage of the new tools, generating around 7,000 among Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts. Among them, RadioShack, CMT, ZUJI Australia and Unilever’s Magnum Ice Cream brand. These ad tools have proved successful for the majority of companies, but the penetration seems still low compared to the potential, and Twitter is not yet comparable to other social sites platforms.

So let’s briefly look at the main pros and cons of the tools.

The main advantages of Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Trends and Accounts consist in an immediate “tech-savvy” reputation for companies, the possibility flawlessly integrate the ad into the social media content, and the opportunity for real time interaction with target customers.

On the other side, the major shortcoming of the tools is, first of all, that Twitter user base is still small compared to other social network, thus limiting the reach for companies and marketers; moreover, since Twitter platform is continuously changing and evolving, companies and marketers need to take it into account and be ready to manage all the changes in their advertising tools.

How can marketers and companies make the most of Twitter’s advertising platform, and what are the likely business results, will be the key aspects that will determine Twitter’s advertising tools success.

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