Promoted Tweets

I made a fun post about a book a love so now it is time to do a more serious; work related post. Buckle up! As you might have guessed from the title, I wanted to talk a bit about promoted Tweets. Most everyone knows by now that Twitter is experimenting with these ads and has offered a beta to a handful of companies -- most notably Pixar.

So what are these promoted Tweets? I must confess that I had no idea what exactly they were going to look like. Now we know. It is interesting that they chose to put a promotional notice in the "trending topics" section because this doesn't seem to scale well at all. What happens when this ad program is opened to everyone? Will Santa's naughty and nice list be running down the side of everyone's Twitter page? I certainly hope not.

The ad doesn't stop there though. It moves on to the below image. This part of the ad is literally a tweet with special status. It is a manufactured "top tweet." Great idea, but again, I have to question the scalability and the targeting of these ads.
Twitter could choose to only allow say 3-4 promoted ads to appear on any given page or search result, but how would it decide which ads to display where?

The search result page ads are simple enough. The searches would run as normal and relevant ads would display for the corresponding search. Allow a few of the ads to appear at the top and voila!

The trending topic ads are trickier. How do they know where to appear? Are they targeted? If so, what are the targeting options? Targeting by geolocation certainly seems viable; but you cant really know what you are getting with that. What other options are possible? Twitter asks for neither age nor gender so those are out. There is the info on your bio... hmm... intriguing! After browsing around Twitter for a while you will quickly realize that peoples' bios range from the official @mattcutts to the random @nathanfillion (sorry to Nathan Fillion for that one). There is, in fact, so little to target, targeting at all is impractical.

In conclusion, I really don't see Twitter ads continuing on exactly like the above Pixar ad. The trending topic part of the ad hits a snag that I just cant reconcile with a working model. Unless Twitter wants to have a bidding war for trending topic ads, but that would be a lot of competition for a very small space. We will see how this plays out. Personally, I can't wait to get in there and see some data!