Twitter Advertising May Cure Itself

Twitter advertising is not the devil's work. I once thought it was. Now it seems more like an evolution towards an ad form that will serve both users and brands. I don't know what that ad form will be exactly but the paid tweet we see today is not it. During this evolution, twitter advertising will likely piss off a lot of people. Here's why it will "cure itself:"

1. Full Disclosure is a Must: Tweets that are from paid or otherwise compensated advertisers must include a disclosure like (#ad) or (#Sponsor) to be in compliance with the new FTC Guidelines. With that clarity, followers will decide themselves if they want to continue to follow folks who deliver paid messages

2. Relevance Requires Few Ads: users who rent out their tweets will have to do so judiciously both choosing sponsors they care to endorse and keeping them extremely limited. So-called "trust agents" will lose trust, or worse, relevance for their readers if they pump out too many paid messages

3. New Formats on the Horizon: clearly Twitter, itself, is working behind the scenes on revenue (read: advertising vs. premium service fees). Not only that but services like ad.ly will continue to explore acceptable formats. If I can quickly see the paid tweets in my Tweetdeck stream becuase they are shaded differently or feature some other visual marker, that is to everyone's benefit.

4. Advertisers Will Lose Interest: Initially the format will draw the lazy marketer (thanks to Erik Boles and his comment on Scoble's post below). They will seek a reach play and what they really need is a "relevant reach" play combined with some string engagement on another platform. They will seek click throughs form tweets as a measure of success and when that eventually doesn't deliver business success for clients, the fad will die off.

 

Good Post on Subject From Robert Scoble

Scoble has a good post on Twitter advertising and based on today's NYTimes article on the subject, this will likely become a bigger deal for us Twitter users in the short term.  Robert explains his initial reaction to tweet-based adverts and then his exploration once joining ad.ly.

"But all this stuff makes me worried for the future of Twitter. I think Twitter needs to come out for or against these new ad networks and needs to build a platform that properly identifies advertising tweets via a different color. I’d love to be able to “tag” Tweets using my SuperTweet idea and write “advertisement” in the SuperTweet, which would tell everyone that that Tweet is an ad."

Read the comment stream - it's worth it.

Comments

[Jeff Vitkun]

The shades of gray interest me here. Even if I am not "renting out my tweets" per se, I still could stand to benefit financially by tweeting.

I wonder if spam and quasi-spam will be the undoing of social media as the 'it' platform to reach consumers on.

[Donde Invertir]

Hi, I think your article its very important and interesting,good work, thanks for sharing!! Have a nice day!!!