Which Twitter App?

This past Tuesday Twitter made the long-awaited announcement regarding how they will finally monetize their service. The idea is called Promoted Tweets and in a nutshell they are regular tweets that an advertiser would normally post, which eventually get promoted by the advertiser for a fee.

Twitter will allegedly be able to gauge the popularity of promotional tweets (like the giveaway from Starbucks) and will only allow advertisers to promote tweets that will be valuable to users. @ev and @biz claim that because they're heavy Twitter users themselves, they have only the best in mind for their user base.

Organic Ads

They emphasize the fact that a Promoted Tweet always starts its life out as a regular tweet which followers of the given brand see rain or shine. In this way they claim the system is a much more organic ad platform than most that exist today. Their goal is useful, real-time info for users. They are using the term resonance to describe how a Promoted Tweet is performing. And if the tweet doesn't resonate with users, it will get pulled. No word on how the payment changes in this case, but it definitely is incentive for advertisers to promote truly useful offers.

Slow Rollout

They are rolling out the changes incrementally. First, promoted tweets will start appearing in search results as early as next week, but they will appear only in search results. One Promoted Tweet per search result page. They will closely monitor the acceptance or problems that occur with the system, and when people are ready, they will add Promoted Tweets to regular timelines, and even Twitter apps.

Hopefully this will allow Twitter to start earning something for all the hard work they have done to create an open communication platform.