Twitter Promoted Products webinar leaked

Ronny Kerr · February 16, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1723

Not-so-exciting presentation takes 40 minutes to explain to potential buyers advertising on Twitter

Well, it’s not nearly as riveting as the story of a hacker gaining access to over 300 internal documents, from financial projections to meal preferences, but it looks like Twitter has another leak on its hands.

This time it’s a 40-minute video recording of a Twitter-hosted webinar in which a representative from the company walks potential advertising clients through all the many facets of Promoted Tweets and Accounts. (The full video, which was originally published by Peter Kafka on MediaMemo, is embedded at bottom. It really is 40 minutes and it really is all about advertising on Twitter, so watch at your own risk.)

The video is broken down into four sections: Promoted Tweets & Account, Live Demo: Campaign Set-up & Best Practices, Live Demo: Analytics & Timeline Activity Dashboards, and What to Expect: Support & Escalation Path.

In the first portion, Twitter explains the functionality of two of its Promoted Products, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. Here’s a refresher: the former are tweets that appear at the top of search results based on keyword targeting, and Twitter is currently rolling them out to integrate directly into user timelines. Promoted Accounts are those that Twitter pushes to the top of a user’s “Who to follow” list, based on their interests.

Next, the presenter moves on to “best practices,” where she sounds a bit like a child explaining Twitter to her parents: “Make sure your tweets are funny.” Anyone who uses Twitter extensively knows that the key to tweeting is being conversational, relevant and (the whole point of 140 characters or less) witty, but I suppose brands and businesses new to the site may not know exactly what they’re doing.

Finally, the video moves through the nitty gritty of buying advertising. For example, clients are told they should expect one to three percent on their Promoted Tweets, translating as retweets or likes. New ad buyers are told they must spend at least $5000 on ad inventory to try out the new products, according to Kafka's tipster.

Kafka says in his post that Twitter is looking to “generate something like $100 million” from advertising in 2011, but they might have already gotten halfway there last year, if estimates from Internet market researcher eMarketer are correct. eMarketer published a report less than a month ago estimating that Twitter ad revenues could reach $150 million this year, tripling revenues of $45 million from last year.

Here's the video:

Ronny Kerr

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Joined Vator on April 9, 2008

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.