by Natalia Klishina
Towards the end of 2010, CallFire was invited to try out the beta of Promoted Twitter. I had originally written a blog article explaining the service and reviewing it. Unfortunately, this article has been removed due to Twitter's informing us that "during the beta rollout of [their] Promoted Products services, advertisers can't blog about their experiences using the products."
Here's some information on what the service IS for those just researching the topic:
What is Promoted Twitter?
Promoted Twitter is a way for Twitter users to highlight their account or their tweets to the Twitter community -- for a price, of course. There are essentially 3 categories this falls into: promoted accounts, promoted tweets, and promoted trends.
Promoted accounts:
Promoted accounts highlight your account as a whole to other users. This can be done through targeting specific keywords in people's descriptions, or through relying on whatever algorithms Twitter uses to determine whom you're relevant to (the details of this process still remain a mystery). The way this manifests is through the "Who to follow" suggestions all users see to the right of their feed. Your account will automatically be recommended to users likely to be interested in following you, but you can also add specific interests you want to target.
Promoted tweets:
Promoted tweets highlight not the account, but specific tweets posted by that account. This means that you must first organically post a tweet that includes the keyword or hashtag you want to target. If another user then searches for that keyword or hashtag, and if you are the highest bidder on that keyword or hashtag, one of the tweets you promoted under that campaign should show up at the top of that search. The tweet will have a yellow tag underneath it saying "Promoted by... ." Resonating Tweets will be automatically recommended to interested users in their timelines, but you can also add interests and search keywords for which your tweets will show up.
Promoted trends:
Promoted trends work essentially the same was as promoted tweets, except you also make the hashtag or keyword under which you promoted a tweet into a promoted trend. This then forces that hashtag or keyword into the "Trends" section, and your tweet will always appear at the top of that trend feed. I've seen some really creative ways of doing this, and it seems to work best when companies attach a promoted trend to a specific promotion or competition.