Twitter Is Putting Ads In Users' Timelines--With Some Exceptions

Get ready to see more ads on Twitter--if you follow certain accounts.

Twitter announced Thursday that it will be adding "Promoted Tweets," or advertiser-sponsored Twitter posts, to users' timelines. However, these ads will only appear to a user if she is following a brand that is participating in this advertising program.

In other words, if you don't want to see any ads, then don't follow Twitter accounts belonging to brands or companies that are advertising via Twitter's Promoted Tweets program, which include Groupon, LivingSocial, Microsoft Xbox, Starbucks, Virgin America, HBO, Dell, Gatorade, and Best Western, among others, according to Twitter.

Could Twitter's new ad plan end up punishing the marketers that choose to advertise with Twitter's "Promoted Tweets," by causing them to lose followers who aren't into seeing ads in their Twitter feed? It remains to be seen.

Twitter pitched the new in-stream ads as "a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly," though an advertisement is, at the end of the day, still an advertisement, and some Twitter users have not been especially open to the idea of seeing more ads on the social media site.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the Promoted Tweets will, for the time being, be visible only on Twittter.com, and not on third-party Twitter clients or even Twitter's official apps.

"We are rolling this out via Twitter.com at first," the spokesperson said in an email.

In a blog post, Twitter described how the tweets will appear to users:

These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once. Promoted Tweets can also be easily dismissed from your timeline with a single click.

See a screenshot, via Twitter, of how the Promoted Tweets will appear:

Comments

[TYRANNASAURUS]

06:59 PM on 07/29/2011

Twitter Is Putting Ads In Users' Timelines..........DUH?

Of course they are.....the whole idea of twitter, facebook, texting and cell phones is for advertisers to be with you 24/7....they don't care about your stupid tweets and texts....they want you handy so as to sell you crap....CRAP they talk you into thinking you can't live without... I don't cell,tweet,text etc,etc...my life is my own.

[mediamarv]

03:21 PM on 07/29/2011

Cancelled my Twitter account. No more ads. I get enough of them (and haven't learned how to delete them yet) on my HuffPo mobile account. They are wasting their money advertising there cause any ad that shows up, automatically becomes a "do no patronize" member.

[Benjamin Rosenfeld]

12:11 PM on 07/29/2011

That's what was causing those? So I changed my password for nothing? I'm still going to delete them as I catch them, which actually isn't very often since I'm rarely on it.

[Mactan99]

03:30 AM on 07/29/2011

I'm glad I decided to read this, now I know what else NOT to use. It is so sickening to be constantly bombarded with ads no matter where we are, or what we're doing, isn't there anywhere these days to be "safe" from having crap and services jammed in our faces? And people wonder why I have such a huge DVD & CD collection. At least when watching A DVD instead of TV, I don't have to sit through countless boring commercials full of stupidity. Same with playing a CD, no annoying 50 commercials in between songs. ENOUGH ads already!

[steves1709]

01:21 AM on 07/29/2011

There are still people with empty, boring lives that still use Twitter? I thought it had faded away, kinda like facebook is doing...

[charpist5]

11:56 PM on 07/28/2011

Tweet, tweet, tweet. Do any of you realize how utterly ridiculous that sounds? Twitter twitter twitter, tweet, tweet, tweet. Do people not have lives anymore? Must everyone have "followers" to make sure, what, that every inane thing you do all day long is known by everyone? Pathetic, in my opinion. You (whoever you are) are just not that important. Yes indeed, the twits on twitter...that about sums it up.

[Mactan99]

03:22 AM on 07/29/2011

I agree with you 1,000%!

[theleftwingblows]

09:59 PM on 07/28/2011

just a bunch of twitts on twitter

[whatsit2yadudes]

08:45 PM on 07/28/2011

Ad bombarding...just like on youtube.com. Go figure!

[whodo1952]

07:41 PM on 07/28/2011

Marketing engineers are geniuses, they get to program our every move.

[whodo1952]

07:43 PM on 07/28/2011

I can hear them now, dance puppets dance!

[Pieulle]

07:17 PM on 07/28/2011

Twitter is a waste unless if you are famous yourself or if your following someone famous.... it's that simple!

[Gravenstein]

08:24 PM on 07/28/2011

Not it isn't. Like any tool, it is only useful to those who know how to use it.

[dhubhgaill]

01:02 AM on 07/29/2011

right, like the scammers and hackers.....I prefer my privacy

[hereIamHuff]

02:41 PM on 07/28/2011

Grrrrr... advertising/marketing is a leech on society. Sad story :(

[jaycg9]

03:48 PM on 07/28/2011

This is the price we pay for getting to use a free service. You would not have network TV without ads. You would have significantly more expensive cable channels without ads. You'd have to pay HuffPo just to be here if they didn't have ads. Print magazines would be prohibitively expensive without ads. Twitter is entitled to do what they can to make money. It's a business seeking profit, not a charity. If charging people to use it is not an option then it has to be something else. Are a few ads really such an imposition on your life considering all that you get from it?
I don't like it either, but come on.

[hereIamHuff]

04:17 PM on 07/28/2011

Yes, it is an imposition on our lives and the only way that marketers will know our limits is if we very vocally tell them. Advertising's sole purpose is to distract us from whatever (potentially) useful thing we're thinking about or doing and draw our attention to their product - a leech!!! (With twitter the argument fails a little with how 'productive' a thing you could be doing there :) ) I mean, the original purpose of cable television (which was the first time you had to pay for television) was to remove advertisements and instead charge a fee. I would be more than willing to pay more for news and media without advertisements. This way I get to choose what I consume and not marketers!!!

[Angelo Locicero]

01:11 PM on 07/28/2011

So lets say I follow Xbox and they put an ad out on my timeline...I get their tweets sent to my phone...will the ad not be sent to my phone or will it...cause if it is I have some un-following to do!

[theleftwingblows]

10:00 PM on 07/28/2011

what the hell are you talking about