So Twitter has finally announced they were going to try and monetize their site. Their idea? To offer featured tweets for money – but is it going to work…?

Most people do not go on twitter.com, but rather through a third party client like twhirl or seesmic. This would explain why Twitter needed to go through the “Promoted Tweets” route rather than to just display advertising on their homepage. However Twitter is not Google, and will never be close to competing.

So that leaves Twitter with only a few options with which to distribute “promoted tweets”:

• Unsolicited tweet – somebody that you aren’t following will appear in your twitter feed or as a direct message
• You will receive an @reply
• Or “promoted tweets” will appear in your twitter search page closer to the top than others

Displaying these promoted tweets on your twitter search pages may seem like a good idea for an advertiser, however the amount of people that actually use the twitter search function is miniscule in comparison to Google search and therefore the return will be minimal. And of the ones that would be using twitter search, they are unlikely to be looking for products and services – for this they would just go to Google!

If Twitter search is used through a client, then surely the client would just filter out these ‘promoted tweets’ from their results before it reached the end user?

The same can be said about unsolicited tweets. The client would no doubt eventually cross reference the people you have chosen to follow against what appears in your timeline, filtering out ones that should not be there, making this idea redundant.

Twitter has however chosen to display these “promoted tweets” in SERPS… is this just the beginning?