Twitter to allow brands to advertise in user's timeline

Micro-blogging site Twitter will now allow brands to advertise in a user’s timeline, regardless of whether they follow the advertiser or not.

In July 2011, Twitter launched promoted tweets, its own form of advertising, in users’ timelines.

Twitter users saw sponsored messages in their timelines, but only from brands and organisations that they already follow. Before that, promoted tweets had appeared only in search results and on the top of the Twitter trends lists. But according to the new system, Twitter users can be served adverts from a company in their personal timelines, regardless of whether they follow the brand, the Telegraph reports.

“This will be the first time that consumers will be exposed to adverts in their timelines from brands they don’t follow. Initially, we will make this feature available to a single-digit percentage of our global user base,” the paper quoted company’s spokesman, as saying.

“Of this group, we will only show promoted tweets to people from advertisers relevant to their interests,” he said.

“We are carefully measuring how users respond to and engage with these Tweets; based on this response, we will roll this capability out to a wider audience in the coming months,” he added.

Twitter users would be allowed to remove the advert, or ‘timely tweet’, from their timelines with one click.

According to the paper, Disney, Pepsi and Xbox, are some of the brand partners it is working with while rolling out this next stage of its advertising program.