Google has a new Internet marketing strategy… Twitter ads!
If you weren’t already aware, last year Google paid Twitter $15 million to include tweets as search results. Here’s what Google had to say then:
“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.
That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
This alone was a bold move for Google to pay another company for content to list. As if Google doesn’t have enough content to index. Nonetheless, Google is showing it’s love for the micro-blogging platform once again by announcing that they’ll now be displaying ads from Twitter, also known as Promoted Tweets.
Promoted Tweets is a program Twitter launched in April that started out with companies like Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America that Twitter identified as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”
[text_ad]
Much like Google Ads, these tweets show up at the top of search results pages and are clearly labeled as “promoted”. The Wall Street Journal reported that advertisers have been spending “upwards of $100,000”, but I’ve never personally seen a Promoted Tweet in my search results.
Image courtesy of: AdAge
In any case, Google is now displaying Promoted Tweets as Real Time Results just as they would their own Google ads. SearchEngineLand.com notes, “It’s very important to understand that Promoted Tweets will NOT show within regular Google search, which sometimes integrates real time matches along with web search listings and other matches. They’ll only appear when someone drills-down into the real time results after doing a regular search at Google, or if they conduct a search from the still relatively new Google Realtime Search home page.”
Image courtesy of: SearchEngineLand.com
When Danny Sullivan contacted Google to confirm that this was the first time for them accepting other ads on their platform, they confirmed and added:
“Twitter is pioneering advertising against short-form content, so it was a natural starting place for us. We’re certainly open to continue exploring other advertising models and systems, including those we might develop in-house.”
Makes sense for Google especially, considering it’s a 50/50 split. Obviously, Google sees the potential, though I wonder if Twitter will at one point roll out their own PPC program in the future.
