Twitter to have 'paid tweets' on searches

Twitter announced in the US today that it is introducing advertising by allowing companies to pay to have their messages show up first in searches on its site.

The debut of “Promoted Tweets” comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.

The ads will apparently not bring in much money during the experimental phase of Twitter’s commercial push.

Virgin America, one of the advertisers which Twitter invited to test the concept, is not paying for its first burst of promotional messages, according to Porter Gail, the airline’s vice president of marketing.

“I would expect that it would turn into a paid model in the future,” she said.

Twitter said Best Buy, Sony Pictures and Starbucks were among the other advertisers using Promoted Tweets.

Twitter has grown quickly in popularity since it started in 2006, with celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher “tweeting” messages of 140 characters or fewer alongside everyday users.

About 22 million people in the US used Twitter.com last month, up from 524,000 visitors two years ago, according to comScore Inc.

But the site has been slow to capitalise financially on that success.

Twitter has been making an undisclosed amount of money by providing Google and Microsoft with access to messages for their search engines. Many people expected Twitter would eventually introduce advertising.

In a blog post, company co-founder Biz Stone said today the company took its time “because we wanted to optimise for value before profit”.

These tweets are to be “called out” as ads on top of search results on Twitter, much as sponsors can pay for listings to top rankings on search engines such as Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo.

That means Twitter users would see the new ads when they search broadly for topics being tweeted about.

However, many users connect with the service not through such searches or even visits to the site. Rather, scores of outside programmers have written mobile and desktop software which can access the feeds of Twitter messages that users get from people they are “following” on the site.

Twitter said it might take the Promoted Tweets service further and make them also show up on those feeds.

Mr Stone said Promoted Tweets would need to resonate with users. If a Promoted Tweet is not replied to or forwarded by other users, it will disappear, he said.