Twitter launched Promoted Tweets in April of this year, to allow businesses to highlight ordinary tweets that they would like to reach a wider audience. These tweets appeared at the top of search results pages that have something to do with what users were looking for. The tweets were labeled as promoted is the business was paying to have them featured as such, but they started out as normal tweets.
Today, the micro-blogging site announces that it is adding another product to it’s Promoted feature, Promoted Accounts. With this new feature brands can pay to have their accounts appear in the Suggestions for you section in the right hand panel of a users home page. However, these suggestions will not appear without reason. Twitter is using an algorithm to determine which Promoted Accounts appear to which users. Their blog entry uses Xbox as an example saying if you follow a lot of Xbox-related accounts, but not the official Xbox one then it might be suggested to you. The entry also says that only one promoted account will appear per set of suggestions so users won’t get bogged down with users they may not care about.
As of now, only certain brands will be featured so a lot of users may not even get Promoted Accounts for awhile. Also, it is uncertain whether or not individual users will be able to pay to promoted their personal accounts, but I assume decisions on that matter will be made in the near future as Twitter decides how lucrative Promoted Accounts is for them.
