Twitter has finally begun to gradually introduce an advertising platform - Promoted Tweets – allowing businesses to publish promotional tweets. Since Twitter has revolutionized how we communicate online, it only makes sense their advertising program is a little different.

What do hotels need to know about Promoted Tweets?

There are 3 core principles of the program:

* Twitter will insert the ads into the Twitter stream, clearly label them as promotions, and give them all the functionality of standard tweets

* Ads are confined to the standard Twitter character limit (140 characters)

* Promoted tweets that aren’t attracting attention are to be pulled out by Twitter.

It works best if you’re already doing well in Twitter

Twitter CEO Evan Williams:

[Twitter ads] will definitely work best for companies who Twitter works well for generally

In other words, if you don’t adopt the mindset of being interesting and useful, you can’t simply buy your way into the Twitter community.

Relevance is key for success

Relevance is the big issue when it comes to Twitter advertising. Advertisers will bid on keywords based on a CPM basis initially, but Twitter intends to use a “resonance score” metric to see how much reach and impact individually sponsored tweets have. User interaction with ads will determine the price and longevity of specific ads.

On the Twitter blog, Biz Stone says if your message doesn’t connect with your audience, you’ll be removed:

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. 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.

Relevance – as measured by audience interaction – was core to the success of Google’s advertising model. Twitter’s development of the Promoted Tweets program seems to be the next step in the online advertising evolution. I see a strong chance for it to influence other advertising platforms.

Ads will begin in search results

ReadWriteWeb calls the scheme “delightfully boring“:

Advertisements will begin in search, with keywords being bid on and a single advertisement appearing with frequency dependent on its performance. Then the ads will be extended to 3rd party applications like TweetDeck and others…Finally, ads will begin to appear on Twitter.com, tailored to the interests of users, as easily observed by their messages published and received.

The benefit of Twitter advertising

The ads could become a good way to maintain visibility for important keywords (searches) if the stream is “polluted” with a lot of noise.

For example, many “hotel” related Twitter search queries are full of chatter useless to someone looking for (or working with) a hotel. Sponsoring a tweet that sits on top of this chatter stream could significantly raise your visibility and prevent it from being ‘drowned’ in other tweets.

Program timeline

Messages are currently limited to a small group of test marketers, including Red Bull, Starbucks, Virgin America. (All strong Twitter users already) Expansion of the platform depends how users will react to the Promoted Tweets platform.

Twitter hopes to eventually insert advertisers into the timelines of messages that users see from people they network with – when the message seems appropriate.

Get the full article from: HotelMarketingStrategies

Related article: Twitter to Introduce Paid Advertising