On April 13th, 2010, the social juggernaut twitter.com announced its first attempt at monetization with the promoted tweet platform. Initially launched in 2006, Twitter has built a worldwide membership of over 75 million users (22 million or so of which are actually active). The problem, however, has always been how to make the service generate revenue.

With the announcement of promoted tweets, Twitter thinks it has the answer. The system will initially be available to only a select group of national brands, including Starbucks, Virgin, Sony and 7 other internationally recognized brands.

The response to the launch has been generally positive, although questions are being raised as to why it was so restricted to such a small initial base of corporate advertisers. One has to ask, considering Twitter is such an edge technology with most of its user base as early adopters and technophiles, why it took such a conventional approach with this launch. It seems like a much more appropriate first run of the service would be open to a larger advertising community. Allowing access to smaller companies would introduce considerably more diversity to the promoted tweet landscape and generate more results that had much less of a “spammy” feel.

Regardless, this development should be lucrative for both Twitter and their advertisers… what do you think?

I give a lot of presentations on blogging and social networking and a theme that seems to consistently recur is people telling me “I’ve tried to use social networks, but I don’t ever seem to get any result from them.”. Looking a little deeper into what they’ve been posting and how they’ve been using social media has given me some insight into why they’re not getting the kind of results they’d like to see.

What I’ve seen is that, even though people are using social media, they’re not changing their paradigm in respect to what they’re posting. Social media won’t work if you just use it to push the same old tired marketing messages. YOU CAN’T WRITE COPY AND EXPECT RESULTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA!
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