Political advertising is making its way to micro-blogging site Twitter.
As of this week, political parties and candidates can now purchase Twitter's full suite of Promoted Products - including Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends.
According to Twitter, the political ads will function in the same way as the existing Promoted Products do, but will be given their own special icon. When users hover over political ads, they will see a pop-up disclaimer that identifies who paid for the ad.
“We're piloting the programme with a small group of presidential candidates and national party committees,” says Twitter.
“These partners will be running ads in the coming week. We will expand the pilot to include other candidates and committees as we build up our political sales team.”
The new political project is being headed by Peter Greenberger, former head of political sales for Google.
The micro-blogging site has been playing an increasingly important role in political campaigns around the world - including SA. This year, in the run up to the local government elections, political parties made use of the platform for “town hall” question and answer sessions, among other initiatives.
Twitter says the political Promoted Tweets will appear in the search function on the service, and can also be targeted to followers. “We're not testing political ads in the timeline at this time,” said Twitter in a statement.
Adding ads
Earlier this month, it was revealed Twitter would slowly begin pushing targeted ads into the Twitter streams of users - even if they do not follow the advertiser.
This follows the introduction of “Promoted Tweets” in April 2010 and “Promoted Tweets to Followers” unveiled last month. The latter allows marketers to place their ad at the top of the tweet stream of users who follow that particular brand. Promoted Tweets only appear to users who search for particular keywords.
Twitter proceeded cautiously with the rollout of Promoted Tweets to Followers, limiting the number of ads shown to users and carefully gauging user reactions.
According to a survey conducted by market research firm Lab42, only 11% of Twitter users get annoyed by Promoted Tweets. The survey included 500 Twitter users and was conducted in August, following the rollout of Promoted Tweets to Followers.
The results showed that users were surprisingly unconcerned about the adverts, with 22% even saying they had found a discount offer via a promoted tweet. Eleven percent even said following brands on Twitter was the main reason they used the service.
Share