Twitter goes corporate, adds search ads

From CNET News.com: You're going to be seeing search ads on Twitter after all.

Adding to the whirlwind of announcements leading up to the company's first annual developer conference, several news outlets late Monday posted interviews with Twitter executives to unveil a search ad program that will put brands' messages into users' Twitter streams.

Early Tuesday, Twitter unveiled the program, "a simple service we're calling Promoted Tweets," heralding it with a short FAQ on the Twitter blog to give a sense of what's coming with the company's new "non-traditional" approach to advertising:

You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We'll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don't resonate.

Initial advertisers in the program include Starbucks, Virgin America, and Bravo, all of which have already been using Twitter's reach to promote their brands. With Promoted Tweets, that organically built promotion is becoming official much as Twitter eventually built its own version of fan-created "replies" and "retweets." First, these ads are going to show up if users search for a keyword that the advertiser has purchased. Eventually, they'll show up in users' Twitter streams both on the company homepage and third-party client applications; no more than one ad will be displayed at a time.

According to the FAQ, "Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as 'promoted' when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets."

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