Twitter has been hard at work in recent times to find different ways of earning advertising money and the latest attempt comes in the form of promoted accounts.
Already, the site offered visibility to brands through promoted trends and promoted tweets, and now promoted accounts will help increase the visibility of the account itself, not just the content.
According to a blog post, promoted accounts will be a part of the “suggestions for you” feature on Twitter.com, which suggests users to follow according to who you already follow and who your friends follow.
For example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox. If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.
As Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote last week, one of the interesting parts of this form of advertising would be that “advertising would not be for one-off creative messages, but for a stream of syndicated communication”. He also noted that, like other promoted ad products on Twitter, the promoted content comes mixed alongside non-promoted content, which seems like a good combination. In its blog post, Twitter even notes that some users may not see any promoted accounts at first, since the company is initially testing out the feature with a handful of companies.
