The Future of Online Marketing: Twitter-Driven Text Ads

Twitter marketing, and social advertising in general, have the potential to direct advertisers and marketers into behaviors that add considerably more value than what we’ve seen in traditional advertising.  Pay4Tweet was created to enable the inevitable transactions, specifically with Twitter.  The below movie provides a high-level overview of what Pay4Tweet does.

(video by http://www.thesoundwright.com)

When someone says “Twitter Advertising”, people immediately visualize unwanted ads in their Twitter feeds, or embedded in their favorite tweet streams. I visualize a framework for embedding relevant text ads into web pages that have the fortunate benefit of also being time-sensitive.

If I’m a restaurant owner and there’s a blog post about a street festival next weekend, it would be great if I could post an ad there with specials for the event’s attendees.  Or, if a local blogger writes an article about furniture deals in the area, and I want to sell my designer futon frame, having ad inventory ready for impulse sellers would be a great fit.

Although Pay4Tweet would enable transactions to happen directly on someone’s Twitter page, the future of social advertising will more likely (and probably more effectively) be related to the already common text ad.  Where Google currently dominates the text ad landscape, ad hoc networks and individual publishers will have the opportunity to create customizable ad units made up of content that’s even more relevant because they have to take timing more into consideration.

To this end Pay4Tweet will be providing scripts to make this possible.  Check out Moluv.com , or BPOilSpillCleanup.com (for a more philanthropic direction) to see how a Twitter ad doesn’t have to be invasive to your Twitter stream.  A dedicated Twitter page for ads and marketing works just as well, and having that content be presented in a web site removes it even further from affecting the normal daily viewing routines of Twitter users.

Today, marketing on Twitter largely involves embedding ads that may or may not be welcome, but tomorrow, it will be much more than that.