Twitter may roll out promoted tweets within eight weeks, potentially putting paid-for tweets at the top of users’ Twitter streams.
According to Mashable, Twitter has been in contact with advertisers in the last few weeks to convince them of their commitment to this marketing format.
Promoted tweets won’t be relegated to the side of the screen, like promoted trends are, and may appear at the top of the page no matter how far the user scrolls down.
Users could also see tweets from a brand they follow high up in their streams, regardless of what time they were posted.
Twitter is focused on bringing in more revenue, which has so far paled in comparison to Facebook’s efforts. Twitter expects to take in US$100m compared to Facebook’s revenue from US$3.5bn from ads alone. Twitter hopes this method will attract more advertising and will look at a wider range of options to expand this further.
The move could cause outrage, as most Twitter users are used to the current unobtrusive interface of the social networking service.
There was controversy over the introduction of the Quick Bar on Twitter’s iPhone app, which fixed a strip of the trending topics at the top of the screen at all times, including paid-for trends. Twitter has since removed this.
