Micro-blogging site Twitter has begun beta testing its ‘promoted tweets’ and ‘promoted trends’ advertising products on third party platforms such as TweetDeck and Twitpic.
Promoted tweets, which first appeared in April, allow social media advertisers to post branded tweets, which then appear in user’s Twitter streams. Promoted trends, launched in June, allow brands to add their names to Twitter trends - topics that are of being discussed by large numbers of Twitter users. Each promoted tweet is clearly marked as such.
According to Twitter, if users do not interact with a promoted tweet, either by replying to it or retweeting it, it will be removed and the brand won’t be charged for it.
The announcement was made yesterday by Twitter Developer Advocate, Matt Harris, on the Twitter Development Talk Google group. According to Mr Harris, the beta test is being run across “a handful of desktop applications” with a view to distributing Twitter Promoted Products to the broader ecosystem.
Mr Harris confirmed that third parties would take a share of the advertising revenue, but did not specify the ratio of revenue sharing.
This is a natural move for Twitter as a significant proportion of users access the site’s services through third party applications. One such application, TweetDeck recently reported that it had surpassed 15 million downloads for its desktop app and 2.5 million for its iPhone counterpart.
