Twitter only offers Promoted Tweets to a handful of large name clients, approximately 30, including PepsiCo and Virgin America.
Is this the latest and greatest revenue model for Twitter? Results are unclear. It should be noted that PepsiCo and Best Buy, both of which are active in social media, declined to re-run campaigns using Promoted Tweets.
Some companies cited in the article have had huge success with Promoted Tweets. Those include Virgin America, which credits Promoted Tweets in part for its fifth highest sales day ever.
Promoted Tweets appear at the top of the search results when a user enters a search. Expect the see Twitter refine Promoted Tweets in the future with ads that target users based on the comments of their tweets.
Whether or not Twitter will expand Promoted Tweets to small businesses is anyone’s guess, but it does seem like a ripe market opportunity. The service continues to explode in popularity with more than 90 million tweets sent each day, and 375,000 new users are signing up daily. Currently there are more than 160 million registered users around the world.
