Now, ads on Twitter called 'promoted tweets'

San Francisco: Twitter will unveil a much-anticipated plan on Tuesday for making money from advertising, finally answering the question of how the microblogging service will turn its exponential growth into revenue.

The advertisements, which Twitter calls "promoted tweets," will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought in order to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

Several companies will run ads, including Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo.

"The idea behind promoted tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter," said Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief operating officer.

Since Twitter started in 2007, its growth has resembled a hockey stick, increasing almost in a vertical line. According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March, up from 524,000 a year ago, and that does not include the millions more who use the service through third-party smartphone and Web applications like TweetDeck or Tweetie.

Yet Twitter has been slow to monetize those users. Though Twitter already has some revenue from deals to license its stream of posts to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Twitter's announcement is the first significant step toward a business model. The ads will let businesses insert themselves in the stream of real-time conversation on Twitter to ensure their posts do not get buried in the flow of tweets.

Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who, for instance, happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.
"When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and promoted tweets will give us a chance to do that," said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks.

When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow.

In the next phase of Twitter's revenue plan, it will show promoted posts in a user's Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser. For example, if someone has been writing posts about the Fourth of July, they could see a promoted post from Virgin advertising holiday fare discounts.