Twitter adds Promoted Accounts to search results

Steven Loeb · February 25, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3544

Slowing user growth means Twitter has to monetize each user as much as it can

(Updated with comment from Twitter)

It's no secret that Twitter relies almost completely on advertising to stay afloat. In its first-ever earnings report as a public company earlier this month, advertising accounted for $220 million of its $243 million revenue.

At the same time, the company has run into a little trouble with slowing user growth, and no matter what CEO Dick Costolo says about turning that around in the long term, in the short term Twitter has to do whatever it can to make as much money from each of its users as possible. That means, ultimately, putting ads and promotions everywhere it possibly can.

So, Twitter will now be showing Promoted Accounts in search results, it was announced on Tuesday. As the name suggests, Promoted Accounts are accounts that businesses pay Twitter to advertise to other users.

Twitter uses an algorithm, which looks at what each user is following, and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user.

For example, one person might follow a lot of education-related accounts. If Teach For America has a Promoted Account, and that person isn't following @teachforamerica, they will probably have that account recommended to them.

Prior to this news, Promoted Account recommendations only appeared in a user's main timeline. Now users will get the same result if they search for new education accounts to follow. 

Accounts are only charged when people follow them, so putting will be a big win for Twitter if putting them in search results results in a big boom in new followers for these accounts. 

On the flipside of that, the Account managers will as well, because, as a recent Twitter study, showed, people are 72% more likely to make a purchase from a brand that they follow or engage with on Twitter. The owners of the account are allowed to create their own budget, depending on their own goals.

I reached out to Twitter to find out what percentage of its advertising revenue comes from Promoted Accounts as opposed to Promoted Tweets, but all a Twitters spokesperson would tell me, "We don't have that info publicly available, but Promoted Accounts are an important part of our business because it helps businesses and users better connect with each other on the platform."

"Twitter is a platform built around live public conversations that happen as events unfold in the world. One of the best ways for users to discover what’s happening on Twitter is through search, giving users the ability to instantly connect to conversations and topics of interest," Nipoon Malhotra, Product Manager of Revenue, wrote.

"Search also presents a great opportunity for marketers to connect with users, just when they desire information relevant to their search query."

This will also not represent too much change for the average user, since they were already seeing Promoted Tweets in search results anyway.

(Image source: https://www.digitaltrends.com)

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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.

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