It wasn’t too long ago that Twitter got involved in the advertising business by announcing promoted tweets and plugging them into your stream whether you followed the source account of not. Now, in an effort to explain their advertising horizons, Twitter is announcing a new variety of promoted tweets: Political ads.
You’ll be able to tell what tweets are political promotions based on the little arrow in the bottom right corner. If it is purple, it’s political. Orange is commercial. A number of campaigns have already hopped on this opportunity including, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Mitt Romney. The Washington Post reports that the promoted tweets will come as search results, but also in the timeline of users who follow a political campaign. Let’s hope Twitter is smart enough to narrow down the appropriate party to promote to a given account.
It’s not only about promoted tweets, although that does seem to be the basic unit of advertising available. Other options, presumably available for higher amounts of money, include promoted trends (which aren’t really trends then, are they?) and promoted accounts that will show up in account search results.
It seems like Twitter is totally on the up and up about indicating exactly what is promoted, by whom, and whether or not it’s political or commercial, and that’s a good thing. The question is, with the crazy political advertising concentration that always occurs in an election year, will these promotions serve to clog up what is already the most spammy of social networks? We’ll find out, and pretty soon too.
(via Washington Post)
