Advertise on Twitter?

Okay, online marketers, you may now have another place to run your ads. For the first time, Twitter expanded its Terms of Service tos to allow advertisers to reach Twitter’s more than 45 million monthly visitors. And that figure is on the rise. According to Comscore, Twitter users showed a 15x increase year over year in June. A nice big chunk of online users. But exactly how to advertise and what to advertise remains unclear. The new Terms of Service simply open the door to the possibility, but no system is yet in place.

Advertisers have had their eyes on Twitter for quite some time. If you can advertise on Facebook, why not Twitter? Facebook created a simple mechanism to create ads in under a minute. Wisely, Facebook keeps ads small, relatively unobtrusive, and consistently placed.

In limited testing, I’ve found ads that stay within Facebook like ‘become a fan’ ads far more effective than those that link to an external website. Granted, Twitter users are besieged by tiny urls taking them offsite, but the types of ads and their placement will be critical for their success.

The new Terms of Service are vague:
“The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the Services are subject to change. In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising on the Services or in connection with the display of Content or information from the Services whether submitted by you or others."

Founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog, "We leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open, as we've said before."

Some analysts are skeptical that advertising will catch on in a meaningful way on social networks, arguing that companies are reluctant to juxtapose their brands with unpredictable, and potentially offensive, user-generated content. Time to get over that one. Existing moderation tools on Twitter solve the problem.

But other analysts point out that users of social networking websites tend to spend a lot of time on those sites, providing an attractive platform for advertisers to promote their brands, especially if preferences are tracked. Stone said the company was wary of annoying its growing base of users by pummeling them with ads. And rightly so.

Learn from Facebook. Small, unobtrusive ads, consistently formatted and placed. Like Facebook’s Become a Fan ads, Twitter should consider “Follow Me” ads because that’s really why companies are on Twitter. More followers.

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