Twitter to start pumping out ads

Twitter has unveiled plans to incorporate advertising into the microblogging service for the first time.

“Promoted Tweets” will appear on the site’s search results pages, with companies able to buy relevant search keywords in a similar fashion to the way they do with conventional search engines. Twitter says users will only see one paid-for Tweet per page.

“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 and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand,” company founder Biz Stone writes on the Twitter blog. “Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, retweeting, and favouriting.”

However, the company plans to a go a step further in the future, with the integration of advertising into the regular tweet timeline. The ads won’t only appear on Twitter’s website, but also through third-party clients such as TweetDeck and Echofon. It’s not clear whether those third parties will get a cut of the revenue.

Twitter promises the ads will be relevant to the end user. “There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet,” said Stone. “Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar — they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.”