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Twitter Launching Promoted Tweets

Marcel Media — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:51:52 +0000

Like with many social platforms, many have wondered how these sites and services can capitalize monetarily. Twitter has announced the launch of its new campaign which it hopes will bring in more revenue—promoted tweets. How will promoted tweets work? Adage reports, “Twitter’s version of keyword ads will appear only on searches conducted on its website; users will start seeing those Tuesday afternoon”. Users will also have the option to share these by retweeting.

Some of Twitter’s first advertisers include Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America. Advertising is currently operated by keyword bids based on a CPM basis. Unlike traditional online ads, Twitter will only display one ad at a time in a search As it stands, only Twitter.com will have ads, however, Twitter plans on expanding them to affiliate platforms such as Tweetie and TweetDeck. Twitter may insert ads into users’ streams in the future, depending on how well ads are received.

As Twitter evolves, will its hopes for revenue come true?

Real-Time Blog Search Comes to WordPress

Marcel Media — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:25:21 +0000

It seems as though blogs have been taking a backseat to the instant updates of platforms like microblogs. However, blogs are fighting back and WordPress is leading the way. According to reports from sources such as VentureBeat, WordPress has enabled a feature that allows users to search for blog posts as soon as they are published, similar to the instantaneous updates of Twitter. The new feature, RSSCloud, makes it possible for blogs to tap into search engines and notify them of new content.

VentureBeat writes, “with WordPress serving up millions of active blogs whose updates can now be tracked within seconds, it’s a given that support for RSSCloud will spread across the Internet in coming weeks”. Will RSSCloud spell a comeback for traditional blogging?

Social Cord Makes Monetization of Twitter Easier

admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:54:20 +0000

While there have been rumors of premium accounts, ads and other ideas that could help monetize Twitter, Social Cord is making it easier for businesses, artists and any user to earn some money through tweeting. Social Cord is a new service that allows users to create premium content for their followers to purchase. Users wanting to create premium Twitter content just need to authenticate their accounts on Social Cord and promote the subscription service to their followers.

How does Social Cord work? Whenever users want to send out premium content to their subrscibers, they can log into Social Cord and send the message to the @tipcup Twitter account. From here, subscribers get these messages in a direct message (DM). Mashable writes, “thanks to partnerships with the four major US carriers, the service lets your subscribers pay by entering their telephone number; they then receive a PIN number via a text message which provides access to the content. There’s no credit card required: it simply gets added to your cellphone bill each month. Content providers get around 55% of the cash, while the carriers take 45%”.

The unique way of paying for premium content added by the possibility of increased loyalty and revenue from followers is enough to keep Social Cord on the radar for monetizing Twitter.

Real-Time Search Startups Gaining Traction

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:36:22 +0000

As microblogging sites like Twitter are being used for reporting news stories, many companies have taken advantage, creating real-time search engines. The advantage is also in the fact that Google has pointed out its inability to capture real-time information as a weakness. Although Twitter’s search engine gives instant results based on time of update, other real-time search engines are refining this approach by incorporating other tools that can filter out unnecessary information.

One of the startups creating a buzz around its real-time search engine is Scoopler. According to Venture Beat, “Scoopler gives a results page divided into two columns, one with unfiltered live content and the other with results sorted by popularity. It gives a nice balance of what’s happening right at the moment and what content has surfaced to the top via retweets and shares in the last few hours”. Users can customize the information that they receive from their live streams, filtering out unwanted information, and prioritizing articles and videos that they find interesting.

OneRiot is another startup that focuses on the most shared content, with an emphasis on data analysis. Venture Beat writes, “OneRiot focuses on the actual content users are sharing via Twitter and Digg instead of their tweets and commentary. The company says it factors in 26 different criteria in its search engine, including a link’s freshness, its domain authority or how reputable the Web site is, and velocity or the speed at which a link is shared through the community”. OneRiot’s strong points come into play with its aggressive spam filters. Normally, spammers on Twitter can just attach any hash tag to their Tweets, and show up in search results, but OneRiot analyzes the data for its users before rendering results.

As the need for real-time information increases, many companies see this as an opportunity to break with traditional search engine competition, and branch out into what the users want—instantaneous information.