In Our Own Words

Twitter’s New Ad Types

A Maserati Quattroporte. 2 nights in the Royal Penthouse Suite at the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva. A bender with Charlie Sheen. There are many ways to blow through $120,000. How about adding a “promoted trend” for a day to that list? That’s what it takes to have your tweet appear alongside each user’s account and on the Twitter.com homepage.

The Silicon Valley darling has been playing around with myriad advertising solutions over the past year or so in order to live up to their multi-billion dollar valuation. In other words, they need to finally start making actual money to satiate their investors. So far, Twitter is expected to pull in around $150 million in ad revenue this year, according to eMarketer. Much of that revenue is projected to come from their latest dabble into the ad world, “promoted tweets to followers,” which ensures followers see a company’s paid tweet. Another factor playing into that projection is the soon-to-be-released do-it-yourself ad system, similar to those of Google and Facebook, which will likely allow businesses who don’t have $120,000 to drop on promoted trends, to take advantage of Twitter’s growing 200 million audience.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter are faced with intriguing contradictions. Their entire existence is built around a media that is social, non-conformist, one that is outside the traditional boundaries of what we think of as “media.” If all media is an extension of man, as media guru Marshall Mcluhan theorized, than social media may just represent the culmination of that principle. However the mere discussion of paid advertising on social media demonstrates two things: 1. The social element of social media is not enough to truly get your message out and 2. Money will trump personal connections every time. At the end of the day, Social Media companies provide a service and no service is free. As unorthodox or non-traditional as Social Media outlets will pretend to be, in the end they still need a way to pay the bills (and their investors/shareholders). The medium is the massage indeed, don’t forget to tip your masseuse.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

by Damien Lamanna

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