Advertising on Twitter? Twat?

Yup, advertising is arriving on Twitter. Social media advertising can connect companies to millions of active social junkies online. Advertising has been a part of MySpace, Facebook, and other social sites, but now Twitter the microblogging service. Twitter has been well known for not trying to make money. How will their 70 million plus users take this? Time will tell.

Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone said they’ve taken their time “because we wanted to optimize for value before profit.” Twitter announced on Tuesday, April 13th that it will be introducing advertisements that allow companies to pay to have their ad messages appear when users search Tweets. These ads will be called Promoted Tweets, and will be displayed on top of the search results. These new Promoted Tweets will be tagged as such “Promoted by SPONSOR NAME” so users can identity a Tweet versus an Ad.

Apparently Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America will be participating in the roll out of Promoted Tweets on Twitter. These Promoted Tweets will be similar to paid sponsored ads which run on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

This is live already. See an example of a Starbucks ad below from.

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