Twitter Finally Reveals Its Plan to Make Money From All Those Free Tweets Posted Everywhere

Promoted tweets are going to show up outside of Twitter for the first time, the company announced today, revealing part of its strategy for increasing ad exposure that had been been limited to its own site and apps.

Now, it will serve paid Twitter messages to partner sites and apps, including Flipboard and Yahoo Japan, partly owned by Yahoo. Both Web properties already have strong Twitter integrations with sections devoted to streams of activity powered by the social messaging site.

Twitter said its Promoted Tweets would show up in those Twitter content areas on the third-party sites, as well as in other sections of the sites, and the ads would have the "same look and feel that is native" to the experiences on them.

"For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," Twitter said in a blog post today.

Twitter also said brands would be able to use the same targeting data and creative they use on its platform to reach users with these syndicated tweets. It is clear why Twitter is looking to expand its ad business off its own ad platform, a strategy it started wholly embracing when it bought the ad network MoPub in 2013: It needs to find larger audiences than it attracts on its own.

With MoPub, Twitter has said it can hit more than 1 billion users on mobile devices across various Web properties. While announcing syndicated Promoted Tweets, it said that last quarter tweets generated 185 billion impressions outside Twitter.

Those are impressions Twitter can't afford to let fly free, especially when it has had a hard time attracting massive user numbers like Facebook has. Still, Twitter is known for itsoversized influence over outside media, where its messages show up across entertainment and news sites, all over television, and on out-of-home screens and billboards.

"What makes Twitter unique is that tweets can flow from Twitter to other mediums seamlessly, like TV, websites, and mobile applications," the company said in its blog post. 

Besides expanding the reach of its ads to all those areas, the social messaging service has been making changes to increase its appeal and lure more visitors.

Just last week, it introduced the long-anticipated instant timelines that make its platform more accessible to new users, who now get help setting up their accounts with automatically populated feeds based on their interests. Twitter also has undergone redesigns to make it more dynamic with more video and photos, including a new video player developed after it bought SnappyTV.

In another departure from its text-based, free-flowing roots, Twitter is increasingly controlling the stream of messages, showing users popular tweets they may have missed or even from accounts they never followed.

Twitter's syndicated ads announcement comes just as the company is set to reveal fourth-quarter results Thursday.

CLICK HERE TO GAIN EXPOSURE ON TWITTER USING MY ACCOUNT!

Original Post: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/twitter-finally-reveals-its-plan-make-money-all-those-free-tweets-posted-everywhere-162743

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Can Now Run On Other Websites And Apps

Twitter is expanding the potential audience for its Promoted Tweet ad campaigns by syndicating them to other services, starting with Flipboard and Yahoo Japan.

In a blog post about the new ad capabilities, the company notes that tweets can already “flow from Twitter to other mediums seamlessly” — so why not do the same for Twitter’s ads? The post points to a number of tools that Twitter offers for syndicating tweets, including Twitter for Websites and its new Fabric platform, and says that there were “185 Billion tweet impressions off of Twitter” during the third quarter of last year.

As an example, the company says Nissan could run a Promoted Tweet campaign on Twitter, then have the same ads, with the same creative elements and targeting, run in Flipboard.

“Best of all, because Flipboard already integrates Tweets into the app, the Promoted Tweet will have the same look and feel that is native to the Flipboard experience,” the post says.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that this was in the works, and that Twitter mentioned Flipboard and ESPN’s SportsCenter app in a presentation to ad buyers at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Today’s announcement doesn’t mention SportsCenter or any other apps besides the two initial partners, but the company does write, “This is the first of many opportunities to create such campaigns.” (It also says this provides “great content and monetization opportunities for our syndication partners,” so presumably publishers are getting a cut of the revenue.)

Twitter has struggled in recent quarters with concerns about slowing user growth. If that trend continues, these new capabilities could be an important way for Twitter to make money outside of Twitter itself. (It has also said it will increase monetization by targeting logged out and casual visitors.)

Facebook has also been working to expand its ad capabilities, relaunching its Atlas ad platform last fall to support cross-device ad targeting for outside publishers.

CLICK HERE TO GAIN MORE EXPOSURE ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW!

Original Post: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/twitter-syndicating-promoted-tweets/