Let them eat celebrity vomit

Since late 2007, when micro-blogging service Twitter really started making waves at the popular tech festival, South by South West, most of us in the industry have wondered how the company would make money.

After an age of waiting, and thinking, Twitter is finally getting a toe in the water and started an advertising platform, called Promoted Tweets. This week, the company announced the service, which essentially only makes use of the search function on Twitter, which highlights adverts in yellow at the top of every user search.

Advertisers can also promote tweets sent out by the everyday user that has some good things to say about the brand. For the time being, there is a small selection of advertisers, and when I say small, I mean a grand total of four.

Twitter says that, after a while, it will push these ads into user streams, even if they are not following the advertiser, or using the search function.

It's good to see the company is finally willing to get its hands dirty, but in its current form, the idea seems to be irreparably flawed.

Take a step back for a moment and consider how the micro-blog works. Users have people who follow them and, in turn, they follow other users. The average usage models show 94% of all the blogging done on the site is conducted by less than 5% of the total users.

The majority of those are marketing managers and self-proclaimed social networking specialists, but another chunk of active users are the celebrities. Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and Oprah fall into the list of top 100 people followed and active.

Until Twitter can get these ads into the Twitter stream, it's unlikely to be successful, and even then, it may appear intrusive.

Candice Jones, telecoms editor, ITWeb

Twitter is, at heart, really about vomiting information into a stream and hoping someone will either be interested, or too bored to care if it's interesting. People talk about everything, from their toenail jam, to feeding links to news stories.

Where Twitter really shines, is for companies hoping to get their marketing messages out to the masses. I follow news sites that link me to content that in turn gets hits on advertising, boosting the news agency online commercial model.

Starbucks is being hailed as one of the first to try out this service. If you run a search on coffee within Twitter (namely, on the homepage), you will see a highlighted “promoted tweet” from the company, which will supposedly generate some income for Twitter itself.

But hit onto the Starbucks homepage, and you will see that it already has 836 326 followers. That's direct marketing, targeted at people who love Starbucks coffee. I follow the South African counterpart coffee shop, Vida e, for specials and new products. Vida has almost 2 000 followers.

So, why then would any marketing manager be stupid enough to pay Twitter for something it can and is already doing for free? Perhaps the stark shortage of start-up advertisers is more telling than the company is letting on.

And who will these ads reach anyway? A grand total of 2%? Hardly anyone uses the actual Twitter page to read tweets. Many use second tier applications like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Neither of these applications links to search, meaning that every advert placed in the search will really gain very little attention.

Until Twitter can get these ads into the Twitter stream, it's unlikely to be successful, and even then, it may appear intrusive.

As I said, Twitter is really about vomiting information into the ether and, let's face it, people really love celebrity vomit.

Far better for Twitter would be to actually leverage the social part of social networking, rather than making use of the basic “hope for a click” advertising model. How much would it mean for Coca-Cola if Ashton Kutcher tweeted “I really feel like a coke now”?

Britney Spears alone has a massive 4 709 846 followers, a market just waiting to be tapped. Twitter should be talking to these guys about a single tweet per day, advertising some or other brand and sharing the profits.

Users can even be told that Britney will now be the face of “whatever perfume range is on the market”, they won't care. Each tweet by the celebrity will be heartily welcomed, and reach a mass of customers that brands could never have hoped to reach.

Whether this venture actually works for Twitter remains to be seen, but I am inclined to think it will quietly fade into obscurity.