Tweets now on sale for $100,000

Promoted Tweets rolls out to third party apps, making the service far more valuable – but 100K valuable?

We blogged about Promoted Tweets back in April when the new advertising model was first announced, proclaiming Twitter to be on the right track in their quest to monetize the service. With the rollout onto third party platforms, that track is now leading somewhere that may actually be worth you marketing dollars.

Promoted Tweets is a solid strategy, at least in theory. Sponsors pay to have their tweets featured in relevant search results, only showing the ads to people who are looking for similar content and only staying in place as long as people show interest in them. They are relatively unobtrusive and can add useful content for users. The major problem has been that Promoted Tweets only appear when searching on twitter.com, and the majority of Twitter’s user base regularly use third party apps (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, mobile apps) to do their microblogging. 

That’s all going to change. Soon, any third party who wants to use the Twitter API will have to agree to host Promoted Tweets on their service. Some early adopters found success through Promoted Tweets right off the bat, but now there is real potential for mass exposure. Just don’t expect it to come cheap – Twitter is selling the ads for up to $100,000.

While that is incredibly steep, if the service performs well and users are receptive to the introduction of ads into what were once ad-free zones, everyone will be happy. Making it a success is essentially on you – the company buying the ad space. If you treat it like traditional ad space with a shout-my-message mentality, users will rue the day Twitter allowed this third party invasion. But if you use the space to engage users and find creative ways to get them to interact with your brand, you could start making waves that expose your tweets to millions of tweeple. 

Most advertisers consider Twitter to be in an experimental stage. While there’s a high chance of failure, there’s also a great chance to be the first to do something innovative with the service that takes the web by storm. He who dares, wins, after all.

Would you ever pay top dollar for a Promoted Tweet or do you consider the risks too great? 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry. 

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