Are Promotional Tweets Right For Your Business?	Visited: 854 5.0/5.0 (2 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Shannon Suetos April 23, 2010

For those of you who use Twitter for your business, or for that matter use it to search for information, Twitter has added a new feature, Promoted Tweets.  Since Twitter’s announcement last week, there has been much talk about the service.

Quoting Twitter’s blog, 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. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page. “

The promotional tweets look as follows:

Companies already signed up to use the new Twitter service are Starbucks, Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures and Virgin America.  Porter Gale, the VP of marketing at Virgin America told DM News, “We're trying to use the Promoted Tweets to enhance the conversation with our existing followers, and we are making sure that the conversations are relevant and feel authentic."

Pros and Cons of the Service
If this trend does catch on, it looks like Google may have a competitor when it comes to PPC.  Twitter reaches millions of users a day, and the real time factor could help online marketers reach their audience instantaneously.

Todd Defren writes on PR2 about the possible benefits this service could have for companies who are facing a crisis. If a company is facing a public crisis, “their [a business’] OFFICIAL RESPONSE will continue to float above the [Twitter] stream for anyone who happens to search for their brand due to the crisis.  And brand supporters can re-tweet that official response much more easily and readily, which serves to keep it “resonating” and alive.”

For companies who use traditional telemarketing services, such as non-profits, this could be an alternative way to reach your customer base without picking up the telephone.  Texting has become a great new way for non-profits like the Red Cross to accept donations—implementing a promotional tweet to a landing page for people to donate could be useful.

Promoted Tweets also raises the question of, how effective will it be for businesses not actively on Twitter?  If your business is not familiar with Twitter, you may not know how to effectively write a promotional tweet.  Another question you should ask yourself if you aren’t actively engaging on Twitter is, “are my customers on Twitter?”  If your key demographic is not tweeting it up on Twitter, this service may not be right for you.

It seems time will tell on how effective Promotional Tweets will be—but it does seem Twitter is trying to position itself not only as a social networking medium, but a search engine as well.