Major brands welcome proposed Twitter ad model

Earlier this week marketing news reported that the Twitter social network could introduce a new advertising model, similar to Google’s Adwords system. This news has been welcomed by several major brands who have stated that they will invest in paid-for text adverts on Twitter if the microblogging service goes ahead with the proposed commercial strategy.

Lloyds Banking Group and Virgin Media are among the brands who have been most enthusiastic about the possibility of advertising on Twitter.

Sonia Sudhakar, Virgin Media’s head of online marketing, said that brands could harness the huge popularity of Twitter with ‘highly creative ads’ targeted to specific audiences. In January 2010, the site attracted 73.5m unique users, an 8% increase on the number of people who used the service in December 2009. 

Lloyds Banking Group’s head of digital marketing, Jason Bacon said: “As with any search marketing activity, the key is relevancy to what the consumer is looking for and that paid-for content is positioned correctly in terms of what users expect from Twitter.”

Although it is unclear on what basis the new adverts would be priced, Twitter’s proposal is extremely similar to the Google AdWords system; adverts would appear in searches made on the service, targeted according to the keywords contained in the query.

Given that trending topics are a hallmark of Twitter, the new ad format could offer advertisers an effective way of capitalising on popular topics in real-time.

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