How to Turn Twitter Into an Ad Network in Three Easy Steps
Brands certainly take Twitter seriously; just ask Motrin. But while it's very useful in monitoring conversations about products, it isn't a medium for pushing out brand messages ... or is it? What if certain Twitter users allowed marketers access to their feeds, and matched their user base with advertisers? Then, you would have an ad network and a business model that could provide revenue for both Twitter and its users.
The three steps I propose below are not revolutionary or even all that new, but what is interesting is that they are newly possible (and even easy to deploy) in the context of social content, and many companies are already doing different pieces of the overall equation.
Step No. 1: Acquire inventory from publishers.
Every ad network needs inventory. In the traditional web, this means ad units next to content. In Twitter, this would mean the right to occasionally insert a tweet into a user's feed. To make this functional, all one would need to do is allow users to enter their Twitter name and password (giving the ad network the ability to publish tweets on their behalf) and then have each user indicate an Amazon FPS account, PayPal, etc to which they would like to receive advertising revenue. You could add a few toggles to allow users to define how their feed can be monetized (specifying the frequency of promotional tweets they want, hours of the day they are willing to push ads, whether or not they are OK promoting no adult content, etc). To my knowledge, no one is actually doing this yet, but there are services like Twittertise which allow individuals or companies to schedule ad content to run on a single feed.
Step No. 2: Value and categorize your inventory.
Ad networks need to understand the nature and value of their inventory to be able to match the inventory with advertisers. This is where Twitter gets really fun. Using the Twitter API, you can first get a sense of how much reach each user's feed has. More sophisticated models of valuing reach would include measuring things like how many followers each of the user's followers has (the potential secondary impact), the propensity of those followers to re-tweet, or repeat information pushed out through the feed, etc. You could even screen for location based tweets to screen for local demographics.
In terms of understanding the nature of the users, you only need look at word frequency on the feed. Ideally you would also look at the content which other followers who subscribe to the feed to understand the ultimate audience directly. Many companies are brushing against these concepts, though no one is explicitly valuing a tweet to my knowledge. Summize (which was acquired by Twitter) had a big piece of the equation in the form of a twitter search engine. Countless services out there measure the reach of individuals on Twitter and create tag-clouds based on frequently used words. The upshot: people are very close to explicitly attaching a dollar value to a tweet on a given feed.
Step No. 3: Sell inventory to advertisers, quantify impact, and refine your model.
Finally, ad networks need to sell their inventory to relevant advertisers in the form of 140-word text ads with links to offers, and help those advertisers refine their targeting and messaging to increase ROI. More and more advertisers are experimenting with Twitter and how they can leverage the platform. To do this effectively with Twitter you simply need a system of measuring the impact of your tweets in a way which you can meaningfully feed back into a self-refining model of how you are valuing feeds. No one is after this yet, but a company like bit.ly which gives some analytics on click through rates on links inserted into communications platforms like Twitter is on the right path. In the end, it is just about refining a model of matching types of feeds, with types of followers, with the exact content, time of day, context, etc to get the desired response.
Tada, a Twitter ad network -- abstractable to any social content.
Several caveats:
A. Brands are still scared of inserting themselves into the conversation -- is it inauthentic to push marketing tweets on someone feed? Not sure. I am sure there is a learning process here, and probably the tweets need a 'sponsored' disclaimer -- but the clear fact is that more and more of the consumed content in the world is 'user generated' so advertisers need to figure out how to get their messages out on those terms. Interestingly, Pownce, which recently decided to shut down -- had from day one advocated the concept that on its free version, advertisers could insert messages into people's feeds
B. Very few Twitter users have enough valuable followers to make any money from allowing advertising on their feeds. Only a tiny, tiny number of individuals could even theoretically 'twitter for a living' -- just as almost no one successfully blogs for a living. That said, the more you know about your audience the less it is just about scale. When, all of a sudden, you can actually quantify the value of reaching the specific people who follow your feed, your CPM might be off the chart even with very low absolute numbers of followers -- so long as you have the right followers.
C. Twitter just might shut you down.
~~~Sam Lessin is founder and CEO of Drop.io, a file-sharing service based in New York City.
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Today there ARE two companies delivering ads from brands and companies through Twitter. TwittAd (http://www.twittad.com) allows users to sell their background images to advertisers and Magpie (http://be-a-magpie.com/) offers users the ability to publish paid ads into their tweet streams.
It's up to advertisers to decide which user profile backgrounds they will purchase via TwittAd, but Magpie has a content matching engine behind it that attempts to match advertisers' paid tweets with users posting about related content.
The Twittersphere has deemed static background image ads as somewhat ineffective, yet they essentially act like online billboards. The ads-in-tweets model built by Magpie has caused a lot of backlash among users, but they are constantly refining their matching process to serve the ads.
As Twitter's popularity continues to grow, I can only imagine seeing more companies getting into the ads-in-tweets market. And with more users tweeting, it will also become more attractive for brands to advertise there.
They called it Magpie.
http://be-a-magpie.com/
It's a lame attempt to short-cut your way through Social Media and given that it's the fastest way to destroy Twitter? Many of us will do everything we can to keep it from succeeding. It only takes a genuine effort to use Twitter for REAL Social Media Marketing.
Because of the opt-in nature of Twitter, if executed correctly (i.e. a way of identifying and understanding you will be getting ads BEFORE you start following) it could work well.
If executed poorly or dishonestly, it would be a waste of money for the advertisers and the agency pushing the concept.
As some other users have commented, it has already been done and though not a huge success, the model is continuing to develop.
http://admaven.blogspot.com
The Alltop site features major stories from the web each week consolidated by topic: http://alltop.com/ If you haven't seen Alltop take a look, it's very well done, both graphically and from a content perspective--and very helpful.
Ingenious way to promote two things: Alltop and his new book.
The fact that Guy Kawasaki has over 38,221 followers on Twitter at this moment and is a widely respected and helpful person (and brand) has been very helpful.
Plus he frequently posts links to Alltop himself....
Scott Lackey
Jugular Advertising
NY, NY
If I saw any of these 'ads' in the feed of someone I was following I would immediately unfollow and tell others. The 'tell others' part is what advertisers don't seem to understand. In the Motrin episode the word spread very rapidly across social media and sentiment was two to one negative. In the first two days there were 9000 conversations across social media that mentioned Motrin, 80% were Twitter tweets and the backlash kept spreading for weeks. Prior to the release of the campaign there was virtually no mention of Motrin.
If this campaign had been broadcast into Twitter feeds the negative backlash would have been monumental.
We need new models that don't look anything like 'media buys'. That approach is dead in social media.
I USE twitter (unlike the author of this article, I think) and my friends already love talking about what they're buying, love pointing each other to sales, love bragging about how much they paid for the Dark Knight DVD. I went to Threadless.com and bought 2 Christmas gifts there because of someone's tweet about it. I love hearing what my friends are up to... but I'd HATE hearing anything from a 3rd party in their name.
Looking at ads is how consumers pay for something valuable without using money... no stream is worth paying to follow, so any influx of advertising will be despised by users, and unfollowed.
Why not just create customized twitter streams that promise great coupons and deals? Advertise the existence of the streams on Facebook and other popular sites, and let the followers come! If the deals ARE great, and the coupons ARE good, then people will follow, and re-tweet excitedly "YES! Gap will give me free shipping with this code I got off its twitter stream!"
Brands need to be smart about Twitter. @TheOnion has several thousand followers, and employs a clever staff member to INTERACT with its followers in a hilarious way. They make their money off web ads, not ads within Twitter.
What advertisers need to do is make Tweeting about brands easier. 140 characters is rough... provide tinyurl versions of your site's home page, so that your web address takes up 12 characters in the message instead of 36. If a brand has its own twitter stream that can be followed, then each update must be valuable and provide an easy-to-follow link and allow 30 characters for easy re-tweeting.
Oh, and advertisers need to actually USE Twitter and follow at least 20 people, acquire at least 10 followers and make at least 10 updates before trying to advertise on it. Be smart, people - KNOW what you're facing before throwing your ads on it.
Twitter's charming efficiency is that of a distant cousin: the telegram; And, as with the telegram, if you're communicating anything more than necessary information, perhaps you ought to be using a longer form.
Twitter users are the product of a media upheaval in which advertising can be ignored, or even avoided. Ads will ultimately be detrimental to Twitter's USERS' idea of Twitter's essence and "efficiency": like Joe Friday used to say, "Just the facts, Ma'am."
David Langan, grandcentralgames.com
Marketers, put your creative efforts into something worthy. Just because there's a vast number of users doesn't mean its a good platform for advertising. If that were the case, my bed sheets would be sponsored by Coke...
I think of Rudy Giuliani getting rid of the homeless window washers in Manhattan and how it is a metaphor for what should be done online. Traffic no longer was interrupted, people were no longer as jaded and the community grew, not only in activity but also in revenue streams. Why not put more effort into this sort of planning and innovation rather than finding another way to annoy people.
It will fail if the ads become too frequent, overwhelming tweet streams for users. Essentially, if the noise drowns out the signal, it will fail. They'll also fail if the ad content isn't relevant. Viagra ad tweets mixed in with a discussion about Motrin Moms isn't going fly.
The frequency and context of advertising tweets are critical to the success of this type of ad network. So, who is in the best position to pull this off?
Twitter!
They need to kick the third-party players off their platform and start doing this themselves. Lets face it, Twitter does need a revenue stream.
I recently blogged about a Twitter ad network on Blind Five Year Old:
http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/tweetsense
The last thing I want is fake friends, or worse yet, third-parties hiding behind real friends. Perhaps the author of the article got carried away with the excitement of the intellectual exercise, imagining the possibilities without thinking through the implications for users of Twitter. This mindset is the reason why the public has such a negative opinion of advertising in general.
Didn't you guys learn anything from the Facebook Beacon debacle? It's not just about what can you technically or legally get away with. People don't like it when they realize that you have been sneaking up on them - basically spying on them - through their friends and their social interactions. Two words: OPT-IN. Your scheme does not respect or even acknowledge the user's right to opt-in to marketing efforts. The only opt-out is to delete the contact! And this is exactly what will happen. Deleting contacts is the opposite of what a social network is all about. Thus, this 1-2-3 scheme will act like a cancer, devouring and killing (or at least sickening) its host Twitter. All for a temporary revenue stream which probably will not even be enough to support anyone anyway.
Why is it that many marketers look at all the beautiful stuff you find on the web as means to turn it into money (I mean, why don't they come up with their own stuff instead?)
www.adexchanger.com