Twitter is no longer just a social network – it’s now a full-blown ad network.
The company has just announced plans to let advertisers promote their tweets on to other websites and apps, in effect turning its ad platform into a full network for posting advertisements across the net.
The company is launching the service with partnerships with Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. Advertisers with promoted tweets, which let a company pay the firm to put a tweet in other users’ timelines, will now be able to pay extra to push the content on to the other two websites entirely.
Twitter’s Ameet Ranadive explains: “Let’s say Nissan is running a Promoted Tweet campaign on Twitter, but also trying to reach similar audience on a mobile application like Flipboard. Through this new partnership, Nissan could run a Promoted Tweet campaign on Twitter, with specific creative and targeting, and simultaneously run the campaign off Twitter, with the same targeting and creative in the Flipboard app.
“Best of all, because Flipboard already integrates organic Tweets into the app, the Promoted Tweet will have the same look and feel that is native to the Flipboard experience.”
While the move has the potential to expand the reach of Twitter’s promoted tweets, potentially making them far more valuable to advertisers, it also risks undermining the uniqueness of the company’s service. In its long-running war with the much-larger Facebook, Twitter’s real-time nature is its most valuable asset.
The company has already put that to good use pairing up with TV companies to promote the (heavily twitter-identified) hashtag as the go-to way of targeting watchers on social media, to the extent that even when Facebook hosted political debates in Britain this week, the event was named #asktheleaders.
But in promoting tweets on other websites, the company is asking advertisers to give up on real-time in favour of evergreen content. On the other hand, that’s not that different form how they use the site anyway – which could mean that Twitter has finally worked out how to increase the average revenue per user without simply increasing the number of adverts on the site.
