14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been experimenting with revenue streams lately and advertising has been the avenue of choice so far. Granted, Twitter ads are not your regular web ads, but that is proving to be their major advantage. The recently introduced Promoted Trends ads have only been used a few times, but the initial results seem to be promising. The latest Promoted Trend is probably the most intriguing too, as it’s for basketball star LeBron James.
The LeBron Promoted Trend showed up on Twitter yesterday though it seems it was less popular than previous such ads as it is already gone. While it was available, the topic led to a search for the basketball player on Twitter which featured an NBA Promoted Tweet on top. This last part is crucial to how Promoted Trends work, there would be much less value in the ads if all they did was provide a Twitter search.
It’s interesting to note that the NBA decided to pretty much latch on a popular subject, as the player is currently in the process of looking for a team for the next season, to promote its site. “For all your LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and other NBA Free Agency updates check out Decision 2010 on NBA.com,” the Promoted Tweet read.
Twitter introduced Promoted Trends last month and they’re still in the experimental phase. The first such trend was for Disney’s Toy Story 3 and proved rather popular, being available for a few days. Twitter has said that Promoted Tweets and Trends that don’t drive engagement won’t survive for too long.
Just last week, Coca-Cola recounted its success story as the company boasted 86 million impressions for the Promoted Trend ad it ran and a huge 6 percent engagement rate. These kinds of figures are unheard of in the web advertising world, so it’s really starting to look like Twitter has a winner on its hands.