Advertising on Twitter: A double-edged sword

Twitter is the darling of the media in 2009, no question about it. The question is (especially for marketers): “How can I take advantage of it?” Some have succeeded through the use of the service itself, but others would like to resort to an old solution: advertising.

It is to some extent contradictory to the purpose of using social media in the first place, which is to “engage in conversation and…” (why bother continuing, you’ve heard it a million times right?).

But still, it will take a while before the force of attraction of advertising becomes less powerful. And the trick is in that even if there is no advertising solution on Twitter because of the lack of approval from its founders, several third party websites have come up with some alternatives.

So let us examine all the options available:

1. Advertising network

Networks like BeaMagpie, Twittad and Izea offer to insert tweets into the tweet stream of influential twitterers.  Their solutions are targeted in terms of location, profile and interests of the user but also his/her influence. However, they are highly controversial on Twitter as they are perceived by many users as spammers. Plus, in a way they break one of the commandments of social media: “be genuine!”.

2. Targeted solutions

Twitterhawk targets users by topic and location and sends a tweet to the targeted audience on your behalf. This solution might be less heavy handed than the approach mentioned before as it appears directly as advertisement and does not confuse the user. Nevertheless, some users of the platform, (like the creators of Twitter), are not big into advertising at all.

3. Affiliation

You have the possibility to run an affiliation campaign with Tweetbucks. The way it works is that twitterers pass an URL with a tracking implemented, as to keep a record of the traffic and sales that have been generated. Note that you have to be registered on a traditional affiliation platform (e.g. Commission Junction) to be able to use this service. Even if the website invites users to be completely transparent on the use of the service, similar issues to the ones mentioned above may keep reoccuring.

4. Coupons

Yes, you can create coupons on Twitter with twtQpon. I know this is not real advertising on Twitter, but I think it might be a solution to measure how Twitter can influence sales. You can implement a tracking code attached to the coupon and monitor the number of people coming from Twitter who have bought your product.

5. Indirect advertising

This is not advertisement on Twitter, but it still involves the microblogging platform. The news aggregation website Tweetmeme offers the possibility to insert your story into their newsfeed or to sponsor a channel. It might be a good option because your are completely transparent on the fact that it is advertising and TweetMeme has seen its traffic exploded over the last few months, so this service is definitely an option.

6. Branding  a Twitter client or a Twitter tool

Recently, Tweetdeck offered the punk rock band, Blink 182, the possibility to brand Tweetdeck. That might be an interesting solution as you will touch probably the most active segment in the Twitter population. In case it becomes a proper advertising solution, this is a lead to follow.

With Twitter still growing, you can be sure that the number of solutions will continue to grow. However, there are two things that might not allow for advertising to perform well on Twitter. First, the difficulty to target people. Yes, you can target on location and keywords, but what about demographics? This is one of the basics of targeting and unless Twitter modifies its registration process to get more information out of its users, this will be an impossible thing to do.

Second, the rebellious attitude of users. As mentioned before, Twitter users are pretty reluctant to see advertisement appear on the network, so they can take initiatives to fight it, like developing an application to hide ads or even launching a boycott (well, the Twitter junkie would not make it for sure).

Whatever happens, it seems like Twitter will remain the wild west of advertising and that the only way to survive will be to “engage in conversation… (OK, you get what I mean!).

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under New Media Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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