Twitter starts roll-out of new ad format

In a bid to up its revenues, popular microblogging site Twitter is rolling out a new advertising format which will put promoted tweets from brands and companies right into the users' timelines. The new system — which will be tested out in the next few weeks — will take "promoted tweets" from companies and put them right at or near the top of the users' timelines. "These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once," the company said in a blog post. It added that with a single click, users will be able to dismiss such posts from their own timelines. In keeping with its "non-traditional" advertising model, however, Twitter clarified that only promoted tweets from companies users are already following will show up on the timeline. "We're introducing a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly," it explained. During the test phase, only promoted tweets from certain companies such as Dell, Groupon, HBO, JetBlue, Starbucks and Gatorade as well as some non-profit organizations will show up in users' timelines. Technology news site CNET reports that companies will be paid only when certain actions are taken on a tweet, such as clicking on it, retweeting it to followers or replying directly to it. In the first half of 2010, Twitter rolled out a similar promoted tweets scheme as its initial push for advertising, with sponsored tweets showing up on users' search results. As a follow-up to that, the social networking site enabled companies to list promoted topics on its Trending list, a measure of how much a certain topic is being talked about on the platform. To date, Twitter's advertising model is largely non-intrusive and doesn't come right off as advertising, as highlighted by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone at the initial launch of its business model in 2010. "Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single 'ad' in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn't already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising," Stone quipped. — RSJ, GMA News