unicornnews: Twitter to step up ads

More from the world of digital advertising, and the Wall Street Journal’s tech blog has reported on plans at Twitter HQ to incorporate advertising into the micro-blogging service’s search facility, so that when you search the tweetosphere for tweets on, say, “New York”, you’ll see an ad for things to do in New York, when you search for tweets on “laptops” you’ll see an ad for laptops, and so on.

Basically it will work like Google’s basic search-linked ads system, though ad copy will have to be 140 characters long, so they take the form of a tweet. They should be much more obvious than the current text ads that appear on the web-based Twitter interface, and it’s thought the social networking firm will sell the new ad spots much more proactively, the existing ones generally just promoting Twitter-related services.

It’s thought these new ads would also show when searches are done off the Twitter network via third party clients like Tweetdeck. People who primarily connect with Twitter using such apps currently completely avoid all Twitter advertising. According to the WSJ the new ad system should go live this side of the summer.

Posted Thursday March 4 2010 by Chris Cooke

Related categories: Advertising Online Media