How the "Promoted Trend" for the new Toy Story film appears at the bottom of Twitter's trending topics from Ireland
Twitter has already been rolling out “Promoted Tweets”, but this week the micro-blogging service began testing a second type of advertising: “Promoted Trends”.
Brands can now pay to appear at the end of the “Trending” list – the most talked-about terms on Twitter at any moment.
Disney bought the first “Promoted Trend” slots this week, so “Toy Story 3″ will appear beneath the most-discussed topics on the site.
The ad is well flagged as a “Promoted” link that starts at the bottom of the league table.
As online advertising goes, this isn’t too interruptive and in-your-face – key factors that might otherwise irk the twitterati – and it may even be relevant to users.
While the ad starts at the bottom of the list, it may rise up the ranks, just like other, organic trends – or even fall off and disappear from the list, based on some sort of “resonance” algorithms that Twitter is developing.
As Twitter itself puts it: “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.”
Other advertisers already in the pipeline for the service include Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.
The advertising model and various components such as the resonance algorithms don’t seem to be fully fleshed out just yet, but this looks set to be a hugely important new channel of search marketing.
“As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we are testing trends clearly marked as ‘promoted’ for an undefined period of time”
- a Twitter representative interviewed by Techcrunch.com
What next? Perhaps the company might open up the advertising to smaller players, by creating a bidding system for search terms in a marketplace along Google AdWords lines, and even tying them in by geographic location.
