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Is Twitter Simply One Big Advertisement?
Yesterday Twitter announced that it will be against their terms of service to post advertisements using a third-party service. Initially the thought was services like SponsoredTweets would be out of business in 30 days when the new rules go into place. But alas, the new rules only apply if you aren’t posting your ads directly on the twitter.com website. As I noted last night, all the people who get fat bankrolls using this method will be able to continue but will have to run the ads manually. Frankly there really is no change if this roundabout method remains.
I’ve written in the past that I think most of the content on Twitter is advertisements but it really bears repeating with the new changes that Twitter is looking to implement. Twitter noted in their post yesterday regarding the advertising terms change, “for this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”
So fine, make the third party timeline ad services handle their transactions manually. Frankly it looks like the advertising companies just beat Twitter at their own game.
But more importantly, isn’t all (or nearly all) of the content on Twitter advertisements nowadays? What percentage of content from your followers isn’t an advertisement of some sort? There’s nothing wrong with Twitter creating the world’s largest ad network – it’s just a different route than the one that the Twitter train was on originally. Everything about Twitter today screams ad network.
Here are some types of content I see posted on Twitter — are these ads?
- when an angel investor tells us to check out his/her latest investment with a link to the company?
- when a blogger fills their stream with links to their blog posts?
- when a startup entrepreneur posts a coupon for his/her company?
- when a major company posts a link to their latest press release?
I could easily add more bullets but I am sure you get the point. It will be interesting to read the specific wording once the Twitter API terms are revised. Will applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic be required to make changes? I continue to suggest that building completely on Twitter is a mistake – leveraging is still acceptable.
[...] Yesterday I was thinking that perhaps finally Twitter was starting to move from “just ads” to something more. Posterous was down and they used Twitter to communicate with their [...]
[...] new launch is yet another reason I continue to suggest that Twitter is just one big advertisement. The idea of buying Twitter followers appears to be a concept Twitter itself is also considering in [...]
I think how many advertisements you see depends on who you are and how you use Twitter. Teenagers tweeting about #smalltownpromnight are going to be focused on specific topics like that, which will not have any advertising in it. If you are a business person of any sort, then of course you’ll be running across a large number of advertisements. Twitter is also used for up-to-the-minute news, as well as unique views on news that can’t be found in other media sources. So, I’d say that Twitter content is much more diverse than being “nearly all” advertising content based on the amount of news and specific local topics alone.
Finally, someone brings this up! To answer your question, in my opinion yes. I’ve never been a fan of Twitter but I realized its importance to social media. My first impression of it is that it’s just a place where people can hear gossip about their favorite celebs. And now I believe that is just a place for ads. I just don’t see it’s practical uses for interacting with friends. You have FB, emails, IMs, text, phones for that. And because you can only type in 140 characters, it’s pretty much just a place to announce stuff. It’s like the headline on a newspaper or the teaser ad. And for your last questions, I think links are more like announcements. (Then again, announcing something is the same as advertising something.) And the promos are already considered ads.