Twitter has been doing advertising for three years now, and keyword marketing since last year. Is today’s change that big a deal?
I certainly think so. Let me explain exactly what the changes entail first and I’ll get into how this could mean a sea change for Twitter as an ad platform:
So, to put it plainly, Twitter will serve ads to their users based on the keywords they use in their tweets, as well as tweets from others that they engaged in.  The intent is to give them these ads just as they are tweeting about it. Tech blogs are comparing it to Google’s Adsense algorithm, since the ads are relevant temporally.
Here’s an example. I love talking about Nintendo on my Twitter account. Nintendo could make ads targeting their name as a keyword, so that every time I tweet the word Nintendo, or fav or retweet someone else’s Nintendo related tweets, I would get their ad. Of course, other video game companies, like Sony, Madcatz, IGN, or Capcom, could target that keyword and share an ad to me too.
The great thing about this is that Twitter did some beta-testing with some famous brands prior to public release and they confirmed that it works.
Why is this that big a deal for Twitter? For a while, Twitter’s financial viability was in serious question. It emerged as a great resource to follow news, but did not have a clear cut way to make money from that position.
In fact, there was some debate as to whether making Twitter free at the onset was a mistake to begin with. A competitor has even emerged that asks users to pay for their accounts (a little more on that later). When Twitter finally came out with Promoted Tweets, it wasn’t quite welcomed, but more importantly, it didn’t seem that effective. Twitter has been tweaking their advertising business quietly and effectively in the periphery, and with this change their platform finally gains the robustness it needs.
Keywords are part of what makes Twitter relevant. With Twitter’s own search function, it became so much easier to find like minded people to connect with, or perhaps debate with, interact with in any number of ways. When you add hashtags into the equation, you can discover and follow keywords that are trending in Twitter, popular in a particular given time. This turned out to be even more powerful than we initially imagined, as the hashtag function made it possible to track the exponential growth of a keyword’s popularity, and one can even use the system to make a topic trend on its own.
Twitter literally had the power to create fame, but at this point it hadn’t decided how to do monetization. When they finally settled on Promoted Posts, they were criticized for making it intrusive. At the time, though, I think part of the problem was that we were receiving generic advertising tweets, many years after Adsense. Twitter’s advertising platform seemed primitive and generally ill-conceived then, and maybe it was.
The most significant negative reaction to these changes would appear to be the creation of rival service App.Net. App.Net allows users to publish 140 character tweets, but is a paid service that trades cost with privacy and content ownership. We have yet to see how the App.net experiment will be working out in the next few years.
Coming back full circle, as these recent changes to Twitter advertising make it more similar to Google Adsense, it similarly acquires Adsense’s power. If you’ve worked with Adsense before, you’ll know that it literally built an entire industry around keywords. To add to that, Twitter is a system that can be gamed, as seen again and again in Trending Topics. You can expose a mass of users to your keywords and then target your ad towards them.
However this does not seem to be the direction Twitter wants you to take. Twitter has actually built up a simple FAQ/guide for business owners who want to advertise on Twitter, including some essential web marketing basics. They do not offer a keyword tool, although you can certainly avail of several third party tools instead. Rather, Twitter wants you to trust their system to do the targeting for your ads, and they can also do geotargeting for local brands.
So, there are two ways you can go about Twitter marketing looking forward: trying to game it with keyword research, or using Twitter’s default tools as is. The great thing with Twitter advertising is that using certain keywords don’t make your ads any more or less expensive. However, this is unexplored territory as of yet, so we don’t know for sure if the effort is worthwhile or if Twitter’s algorithm nullifies that effect. Remember, Promoted Tweets themselves can’t be favorited or retweeted. They’re treated as a different kind of tweet entirely. Not everything that works on Google Adsense may work on Twitter ads.
To sum, Twitter keyword marketing is a much more attractive platform for social media marketers compared to before. We’re sure there will continue to be tweaks and changes, but based on what we know so far, Twitter’s ad platform is a useful one if you’re willing to pay for it. Twitter is already great for marketing without using any of their official advertising tools, so this just makes it a much more powerful service for marketers and consumers alike.
If you’re using Twitter to market your product now, you really need to look into its official advertising offerings. Twitter is now a serious contender vs. Adsense and Facebook marketing as the best online ad platform.