Tweet This!

It’s been a long time coming, but Twitter announced their advertising plan late afternoon on Monday, April 12th.

It’s a two-part roll out, starting with Promoted Tweets appearing during keyword searches, and then introducing Promoted Tweets into users tweet streams.

The ads will be matched by relevance, so if you tweet about coffee, a Starbucks ad will appear in the stream.

The coffee magnet is one of the early advertisers, along with Best Buy, Bravo and Virgin America.

This is the first step into advertising Twitter has taken to make money off the 22.3 million users it has. The company is proceeding with caution, knowing that if ads become to prevalent, and annoying, people will stop using the service.

That’s why they’re starting with the search ads. It will look similar to PPC ads on search engine results pages, so people will be familiar with the advertising setup.

When a Twitter user searches on Twitter.com for a keyword, the Promoted Tweet will appear at the top of the search results. The post will have the name of the advertising company, so there will be no mistaking that it’s an ad, it will also turn yellow when a cursor rolls over it.

Companies have been eager to find a way into the social media market. Some use Twitter for promotions, others to check customer satisfaction, or to measure the buzz about their products.

Twitter has created a measure for ad success. Resonance takes into account the number of people who saw the Promoted Tweet, the number of people who replied to it, passed it along to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on the ad’s links. There are nine components to a Resonance score, and if an ad doesn’t reach a benchmarked score, the ad will no longer show.

Right now, Twitter is charging advertisers per thousand people who view the post. This isn’t a hard rule, and Twitter plans on changing it once they’ve seen how people respond to the ads.

So what do you think? Will official ads from companies make a difference? Does this signal the end of Twitter? Or are you eager to get in on the action?