Talk is cheap – so cheap in fact, that we’ve been used to it being totally free. Indeed, the entire social media revolution is based on the fact that members of social media sites can interact with their ‘friends’ on FaceBook and tweet their followers on Twitter, at completely no cost to the end-user. However, as micro-blogging platform and social media phenomena Twitter announced that it had gone live with its much anticipated ad platform, is all that about to change?

Twitter has always been very open about its commercial aspirations. Initially, it planned to charge users a membership fee, however, the site received so many complaints that the idea was abandoned and replaced by the current advertising model.

The keyword-based search product that Twitter have launched their advertising model with, allows companies and individuals to buy promotional tweets, choose search terms and link them to tweets they have already published. Once a user searches for a keyword term, then the relevant ad will be served.

While Twitter has positioned their ad-platform as ‘adding to the user experience’, it has been keen to emphasise the fact that promoted tweets are only charged for when an independent user ‘re-tweets’, and therefore, many users are concerned that their conversations will be compromised.

Whether the new ad-platform adds to the social media experience remains to be seen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business Telecommunications. 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.