Posted By
Eric Anderson on 04/14/2010
The recent announcement of Twitter’s long-anticipated paid
advertising mode, Promoted Tweets, has the digital marketing world, um, atwitter
with rumination and speculation, as we marketers tend to flock to new ad
formats like a moth to flame. I’m more than happy to get my wings singed a
little by joining in the fray.
Despite my avowed preference for contrarian positions, I
have to concede that at first glance, there’s a lot to like about this new
model. I perpetually worry that marketers are in danger of breaking faith with
consumers when they apply social marketing strategies heavy-handedly; I worried
enough to write a book on the subject,
and I’ve previously complained on this blog about the odious practice of paid tweeting.
Twitter’s new model not only hedges against marketers’ worst
tendencies toward exploitation, but it also potentially takes the wind out of
the sails of paid tweeting, allowing me to glimpse a utopian future in which
Kim Kardashian is no longer paid $10,000 to pretend she just ate at Carl’s Jr.
The Promoted Tweets platform accomplishes this by relying on relevance and
popularity as key determiners of a Promoted Tweet’s success.
Much will be made of Twitter’s new “Resonance” algorithm,
which decides whether a Promoted Tweet will continue to appear based on its
implied popularity, but in my view, Twitter has simply taken the best elements
of paid search’s similar approach and made them their own. Not that there’s
anything wrong with that. If, as I believe, social media marketing
is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, Twitter’s adoption of these
practices is a natural step in a long, slow march toward advertiser-consumer
collaboration. At least I hope it is.
How does the Promoted Tweets platform borrow the best of
PPC? Let me count the ways:
- Real-time relevance. Paid search continues to see
year-over-year double-digit growth for a very simple reason: it puts an ad
message in front of the user at the most relevant moment, i.e., when the user
is actively seeking related content. Out of the gate, Promoted Tweets will
appear only in the context of a Twitter search, which ensures a similar
relevance.
- Popularity. Google achieved an unheralded
milestone in the evolution of marketer-consumer cooperation when they
introduced the Quality Score, which enlists the consumer in evaluating an ad’s
worthiness. More popular ads achieve a higher ranking at a lower cost, so
advertisers have a built-in incentive to behave themselves and deliver relevant
content. Twitter proposes to do much the same with Promoted Tweets. Users will
demonstrate popularity by responding and retweeting, and user interest will
keep the tweet alive.
- Unobtrusiveness. Display advertising first broke
faith with consumers when, in an effort to stem hemorrhaging response rates,
publishers made the ads more interruptive. Paid search reformed that tendency
by scaling ads to a simple text-and-link format, constrained to a single piece
of real estate. A Promoted Tweet offers better exposure for advertisers by
placing the tweet right in the stream, but it’s clearly demarcated and
constrained to the same format and length as good ol’ organic tweets.
This all sounds eminently reasonable, which, in the
marketing world, is the first sign that we’re probably missing something.
Twitter hints that eventually the ads would appear in users’ Twitter streams,
based on the content relevance of those streams. They’re right to stay vague on
those plans pending the success of the rollout, because the whole notion is a
little worrisome. Unlike a user’s search results, their Twitter stream is
highly personal, comprised of individual connections they’ve made with real
people. That’s a very ad-resistant type of interaction.
A couple months ago, my Twitter account—along with thousands
of others—got hacked and used to tweet about herbal Viagra. Based on content
relevance, will Twitter now enlist my tweet stream as a mouthpiece for erectile
dysfunction treatments? Do I need to counteract this possibility by changing my
username to StrongLikeBull? Probably not, but these are the worries that keep
me up at night, tweeting about my awesome virility.
Tags: Social Networks, Paid Search, Media Planning & Buying, Display Advertising
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