Twitter made its own headlines recently when the Library of Congress announced plans to digitally archive every public tweet since the microblog’s inception in March 2006.
Fittingly, the Library of Congress tweeted its announcement: “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets.”
Currently, Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets each day, which means billions of tweets will be archived. Direct messages will not be included.
The Library said it would emphasize tweets with “scholarly and research implications,” such as President Barack Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election.
Tweets that won’t make the cut include the newly launched Promoted Tweets platform, which allows companies to send information to their followers in a way that clearly identifies the tweet as advertising. Twitter describes the program as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”
Promoted Tweets will disclose that a tweet is promoted by the advertiser and will be classified distinctly when a Twitter user searches for a keyword term. For example, if a user performs a search for a term that an advertiser has purchased, the promoted message – even if sent earlier – will appear at the top of the result list. However, only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.
The platform will also allow advertisers to purchase keywords that will link to their ads.
Functionally, the Promoted Tweets will be identical to other messages, including the option to reply, retweet, and favorite.
Twitter has indicated that Promoted Tweets are simply the first phase of a larger plan, and it is looking for consumer feedback about the value of the service.
Promoted Tweets “must meet a higher bar – they must resonate with users,” cofounder Biz Stone wrote on his blog about the program’s launch. “That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.”
The possibility that ads will disappear is built into the platform’s pricing model.
The new Promoted Tweets platform will provide advertisers with many new opportunities to take advantage of reaching consumers on Twitter. However, legal issues remain. While a Promoted Tweet discloses that it was “promoted by” the advertiser, those who purchase ads must still comply with traditional advertising laws, even within the 140-character limit of Twitter. In addition, trademark owners may face a challenge similar to that posed by Google, with competitors trying to make use of their marks as keyword search terms.