Promoted Content: API Changes
themattharris
As you might know, this year Twitter launched a suite of Twitter
Promoted Products, including Promoted Tweets (http://blog.twitter.com/
2010/04/hello-world.html) and Promoted Trends, which advertisers can
use to deepen their engagement with Twitter users.
To date, these products have been shown to users on Twitter.com. Over
time, we plan to extend the products to ecosystem partners. Today, we
made an update to one of our APIs that gets us closer to that
objective.
Clients using the API will see new fields related to promoted content
in the response they get back from the /1/trends/current.json request
and any local trends requests. These two new data points will show in
the json response as "events" and "promoted_content".
We are still building the data points out and have more updates to
make. Whilst that is happening, the two data points won't be able to
return any useful content, and instead will have a value of 'null'.
Over the next few months, we will begin beta testing with a handful of
desktop applications. During this period, we aim to learn a lot, and
we will apply those lessons when we expand distribution of Twitter
Promoted Products to the broader ecosystem.
We'll continue to keep you posted on other developments and changes as
they happen.
Best,
Matt
--
Matt Harris
Developer Advocate, Twitter
http://twitter.com/themattharris
Tom van der Woerdt
If I understand correctly, Promoted Trends are advertisements, and they
aren't necessarily trending topics. Basically what Twitter is trying to
do here is let the desktop clients show Twitter's advertisements as
well? Is there any benefit to the developers and/or the users for doing
this?
Correct me if I am completely wrong (wouldn't be the first time today)
but Twitter is offering it's own advertisements to developers - I don't
see why any developer would implement that.
Tom
scotth_uk
users and developers and not simply be a revenue stream for you.
Thanks.
themattharris
and questions about the promoted products are. I’ve caught up with the
team who are working on this and discussed your questions with them.
Here's what I find out.
We began testing Promoted Trends in June as an extension of our
Promoted Tweets which were launched in April. So we all have the same
understanding of what these products are i’ll explain them here.
A Promoted Trend is one a topic which is already trending on Twitter
but not popular enough to make it onto the Trending Topics list. A
topic which isn’t popular on Twitter already cannot become a Promoted
Trend.
A Promoted Tweet is a Tweet which businesses and organisations want to
highlight to a wide range of users. They have the same functionality
as a regular Tweet except a Promoted Tweet will be highlighted at the
top of some of our search results pages.
Until today the Promoted Tweets and Trends were only shown to visitors
on twitter.com. The API additions today take us closer to syndicating
both those products to third parties. How this works out and ends up
with everybody is one of the reasons we started the beta test with a
handful of partners.
As developers the benefit to you of displaying the Promoted Products
is that Twitter will share revenue with you. We’re still working out
the exact value and will keep you informed on developments.
For users the benefit is that they will see time, context and event
sensitive trends promoted by advertising partners. Only Tweets which
users engage with will be kept. This means if users don’t interact
with a Promoted Tweet it will disappear.
Some more information is on our support site:
http://support.twitter.com/articles/142161-advertisers
http://support.twitter.com/groups/35-business/topics/127-frequently-asked-questions/articles/142101-promoted-tweets
Best,
Matt
Tom van der Woerdt
Thanks for your reply :-)
I just discussed it with a few of my users (gotta love the community).
Replies in the mail below.
On 8/10/10 12:18 AM, themattharris wrote:
> Thanks for the replies, it�s really helpful to know what your thoughts
> and questions about the promoted products are. I�ve caught up with the
> team who are working on this and discussed your questions with them.
> Here's what I find out.
>
> We began testing Promoted Trends in June as an extension of our
> Promoted Tweets which were launched in April. So we all have the same
> understanding of what these products are i�ll explain them here.
>
> A Promoted Trend is one a topic which is already trending on Twitter
> but not popular enough to make it onto the Trending Topics list. A
> topic which isn�t popular on Twitter already cannot become a Promoted
> Trend.
Effectively an advertisement. If I wanted to push my application (about
1 tweet per day), I could simply contact Twitter and make my application
a Promoted Trend, right? To me (and my users) that is an advertisement.
> A Promoted Tweet is a Tweet which businesses and organisations want to
> highlight to a wide range of users. They have the same functionality
> as a regular Tweet except a Promoted Tweet will be highlighted at the
> top of some of our search results pages.
Easily compared to a Google advertisement - which is also just a message
on the bottom of a page, except that in the case of Twitter it looks
like a real Tweet.
> Until today the Promoted Tweets and Trends were only shown to visitors
> on twitter.com. The API additions today take us closer to syndicating
> both those products to third parties. How this works out and ends up
> with everybody is one of the reasons we started the beta test with a
> handful of partners.
>
> As developers the benefit to you of displaying the Promoted Products
> is that Twitter will share revenue with you. We�re still working out
> the exact value and will keep you informed on developments.
This will either make the people of TweetDeck etc *very* rich, or it
won't get the smaller developers (like myself) a thing. ;-)
> For users the benefit is that they will see time, context and event
> sensitive trends promoted by advertising partners. Only Tweets which
> users engage with will be kept. This means if users don�t interact
> with a Promoted Tweet it will disappear.
Tell me: what's the actual gain for the user? When I started displaying
a Google Ad on my first website (years ago), some people stopped
visiting the site. How is this kind of advertisement different?
> Some more information is on our support site:
> http://support.twitter.com/articles/142161-advertisers
> http://support.twitter.com/groups/35-business/topics/127-frequently-asked-questions/articles/142101-promoted-tweets
>
> Best,
> Matt
Tom
PS: This is what my community thinks - Please don't consider it
pointless bashing ;-)
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
> A Promoted Trend is one a topic which is already trending on Twitter
> but not popular enough to make it onto the Trending Topics list. A
> topic which isn’t popular on Twitter already cannot become a Promoted
> Trend.
Let's say I've produced a movie - "I am a Villager - Diary of a
Werewolf". I've promoted that movie lots of places, and people are
starting to talk about it on Twitter. How do I know when it makes it
into the "already trending on Twitter but not popular enough" position?
Does Twitter's sales team call me up and say, "We've noticed that 'I
am a Villager' is an emerging trend - would you like to buy 'Promoted
Tweets' and 'Promoted Trends'?" Or does the studio or an agency come
to Twitter at the beginning of the campaign and say, "We've got a
really great movie coming out and want to buy exposure on Twitter. How
do we do that?"
I would hope and pray that it's the latter! I would hope it's
something like the Old Spice campaign that some of my friends here in
Portland helped to build. There *have* to be planning, coordination,
partnerships, tools, design, metrics, analytics, key performance
indicators, etc. to make this stuff work.
> As developers the benefit to you of displaying the Promoted Products
> is that Twitter will share revenue with you. We’re still working out
> the exact value and will keep you informed on developments.
Is there a penalty attached to *not* displaying them? Is there a
penalty attached to ignoring the whole API? ;-)
> For users the benefit is that they will see time, context and event
> sensitive trends promoted by advertising partners. Only Tweets which
> users engage with will be kept. This means if users don’t interact
> with a Promoted Tweet it will disappear.
Like all of the other Twitter services, there's what the web
application reads and writes and what third-party tools read and write
on behalf of users via the API. Is there going to be a distinction in
the metrics for "resonance" of a Promoted Tweet between interactions
coming from the web application and interactions coming from other
sources? Will the analytics be available to the third-party
developers, or do we need to build those into our applications?
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net http://twitter.com/znmeb
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." - Paul Erdos
Mike Champion
I want to make sure I understand the comment you made about "We’re
still working out
the exact value and will keep you informed on developments." Is that
in reference to the rev share for Promoted Tweets?
Dick C was really clear that it was 50/50 split at Chirp (http://
techcrunch.com/2010/04/14/twitter-execs-address-the-big-question-
monetization/). That hasn't changed, right?
Thanks,
-mike
On Aug 9, 7:10 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <zn...@borasky-
research.net> wrote: