Twitter Ads Taking Next Step, Promoted Tweets to Followers

Twitter‘s relationship with advertising has been a bit of a saga, but now it seems that “promoted tweets” are finally going to be put into action. In short, promoted tweets, or what you might call advertisements, will now start showing up in your main tweetstream, if — and only if — you follow a particular brand. For instance, you won’t have to deal with promoted Coke tweets if you are a devout Pepsi fan, as doubtless you are.

For the moment, this new promoted tweet thing will only pertain to certain beta-testing companies like Starbucks, Groupon, Dell and Gatorade. (Full list here.) On the upswing, it appears that promoted tweets will also be available to charities as The Red Cross and the Make-a-Wish Foundation are included in the beta organizations.

The fact that promoted tweets only pertain to brands you follow should make this change a little bit easier for Twitter users to swallow. Of course, it is worth mentioning that promoted tweets only pertain to brands you follow…for now. Things may not necessarily move in that direction, however. For the time being, advertisers only pay when a promoted tweet is interacted with, so there’s no strong incentive to force unwanted tweets down the throats of users who have no interest. Hopefully things will stay that way, considering that because these ads take the form of standard content, they may be invulnerable to various kinds of ad-block, at least for a little while.

(via AllThingsD)