Twitter’s Promoted Trends, Phase Two of Site’s Plan to Make Money

Twitter’s plans to make money have been a popular subject of speculation for years, but it looks like those plans are finally coagulating into something concrete. The microblogging platform rolled out Promoted Tweets a couple of months back, an interesting form of ads. Now, it’s moving to the second phase with the launch of Promoted Trends. The first promoted trend is ToyStory 3, the upcoming animation from Disney/Pixar.

The premise is simple but ingenious. A promoted trend shows up below the list of ten regular Trending Topics on the homepage and on users’ profile pages. It’s clearly labeled as Promoted, though that also serves as a distinctive sign, drawing attention to it. Clicking on the promoted trend doesn’t lead to an ad or a web page for the movie, like people expect link ads to do, it leads to a search for the topic, just like any other Trending Topic.

A promoted tweet for the company also sits on top of the search results, but everything else is just unfiltered chatter on Twitter. Advertisers have no control over what the tweets are going to say, something that doesn’t happen very often with any other form of advertising.

Companies have to be very brave or very confident to choose this kind of promotion, but the risks could be outweighed by the potential benefits. A promoted trend only serves to get people talking about a product or company. If the product is good, or people expect it to be good, as it is the case with the new Toy Story movie, then it is going to get more positive attention from the promoted trend. But if people already have a negative opinion about it, promoting it won’t help much.

Twitter has made steps to ensure that its ads don’t disrupt users and the natural flow of the site. Just like with Promoted Tweets, the Promoted Trends will automatically fade away if they don’t drive engagement from the users. Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends are a couple of examples of features already existing on Twitter used in a way that provides value to advertisers, but also to the users.