Okay Geek Farm
How Twitter is changing ads forever, for the better
Brandon Davenport
“What is this hidden in my Tweets? An advert you say!?” - That is what I thought when I saw the headline of this article at Mashable that said “Promoted Tweets”, which are Tweets that sound like a bunch of BS to me at first. But then I thought of Facebook, and all of a sudden, I saw Twitter in a whole new light.
Advertisements Suck
When we use a website like Facebook or MySpace there are ugly and scarily accurate ads plastered all over the place - adverts in the sidebar, above our friends faces, and even all over our homepages. Advertisements suck (we know that here. That’s why we have just 3) and I think Twitter saw all this, and decided to do something about it.
Changing Ads forever
This is what I think the Twitter team thought - These ads all over the place are ugly, intrusive and not very efficient. The users eyes are glued to their Tweets, Facebook’s, and MySpaces’ and a lot of them ignore ads wherever they go out of fear from “bad experiences”.
Twitter came up with a better approach by the looks of it. Guy 1 decided to ask, “Hey, why is Twitter so special?” Guy 2: “Well, its really simple, easy and clean…” Guy 1: “Then how the heck do we make money, without putting those ugly ads all over the place?” - and as you can see they figured it out.
What they came up with is genius because it is the perfect revenue channel for companies, and Twitter as a whole. Why not put the ads where the users eyes are glued, their Tweet stream! They are essentially normal Tweets, taking up the space of about two fingers high and the width of your hand. Just text and an Avatar, with a little notifier that lets you know its a “Promoted Tweet”.
Why is this so great? There are ads now!
Look at Facebook, now to Twitter, now back to Facebook, now back at Twitter! Notice anything? Twitter is not a busy jumble of images, ads, and profanity from College room mates. It’s a streamlined, easy peasy layout with basic, well made functions. All these “Promoted Tweets” are going to do is add a tweet or two with safe links, that are placed in your searches and feeds for you to check out. They have to be approved by Twitter, so they should conform to the standards we have come to expect.
So the question is, would you rather have big ads all over the place, or a couple (somewhat interesting) Promoted Tweets in your feed? The answer is simple, and they made it that way by mistake. All companies have to make money, and Twitter is doing it their own way.
What do you think?
