On Tuesday Twitter announced the launch of Promoted Tweets, their new monetisation model and Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone blogs: It’s non-traditional, it’s easy, and it makes a ton of sense for Twitter.

In the program, advertisers can pay for their tweets to appear in the Twitter search results page.

Personally I think they have done a pretty good job so far! It doesn’t seem to be too invasive because:

1. The promoted tweets only come up in search results – rather than in our feed.
2. The promoted tweets are organic tweets as well, they just happen to be promoted to the top of the search listing.

I think that this is smart as it allows people to interact, re tweet, favourite or ignore just as they would any other tweet.

Here is a screen shot showing a promoted tweet in a search result for “Twitter”:

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As a regular consumer and self confessed Twitter “lover” I was concerned with how their plans to monetise would affect the friendliness and randomness of the application. I understand that everyone has to make money, and through their application I have made lots of great connections and received plenty of nice warm traffic to my websites. But at the end of the day, new advertising space always sucks, right?

To my delight my concerns have been sated for the time being, and I see they have rolled out this model pretty carefully so as not to inflame the “locals”. It is not readily available for advertisers at this point. I will note with interest how they structure the model for advertisers and whether it will be accessible to small business owners in the long run.

So this is very much a “wait and see game”. Let’s see if the final model is as soft and bouncy as the beginning seems to be and as always I promise to report back!

I would love to hear your thoughts on the changes, and the kinds of results you have been getting from Twitter to date, so please add them below! And while you’re here, subscribe to receive future articles sent straight to your inbox.

Happy Hunting!

Serena “Social” Star

PS. If you are serious about using Twitter to promote your business, check out our very sexy, recently launched E-Book! Twitter for Business takes you step by step through everything from smart set up to understanding how make the most of your tweets and endear a massive audience of potential customers.