If Europeans have all rights to mock Americans for their soccer skills and history, the World Cup has brought at least one thing to the USA but a gold plated trophy is not that thing. Nor are Vuvuzelas.
So what’s it?
Twitter launched promoted tweets just before the start of the USA- Ghana knock out game today.
For a long time people have wondered what Twitter’s business model was and promoted tweets, announced several months ago already now have made their appearance.
During the biggest sports event in the world, which broke the previous Tweets/second record, before the nation with the biggest number of Twitter users plays a knock-out game.
Twitter’s first partner: one of the biggest brands in the world, Nike and also sponsor of the national soccer team of the USA.
The promoted tweet ranks on top of the search for the trending tag #USA. Even when new results come in, the sponsored tweet stays on top of the search results.
What are promoted Tweets?
Twitter is rather sparse when defining promoted tweets:
We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users. [source]
There is no information yet as how businesses will be able to ‘promote’ tweets but it is highly thinkable that an auction platform the base of twitter’s advertising business will be, just as it is the case for Adsense and Facebook Advertising. Get your dollars together and start saving to outbid the multinationals during the 2012 Olympics.
New updates by @nikesoccer are not automatically ‘promoted’ but the top spot of the trending tag is updated.
Update: Unpromoted
Only minutes after the game ended and Ghana knocked the USA out after extra time, the #USA tag was ‘unpromoted’ and not trending anymore. @Nikesoccer was not at the top of the search results anymore either.
