Twitter is preparing itself and its developers for the rollout of its ad platforms, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends, within third-party applications, starting with desktop apps.
The microblogging site launched “promoted tweets” in April 2010, which saw the likes of Virgin America, post branded messages which appeared into user’s feeds. It then went onto launch ‘promoted trends’ in June, which allowed brands to enter the trend column.
The company has made an update to its application programming interface (API) that gives developers access to two new fields related to Promoted Tweets and Trends. These aren’t ready for prime time though; it will be some time before you actually see Promoted Tweets in TweetDeck, Seesmic or any of the other third-party apps you may be using.
“Over the next few months, we will begin beta testing with a handful of desktop applications,” said Twitter Developer Advocate Matt Harris in a post on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group. “During this period, we aim to learn a lot, and we will apply those lessons when we expand distribution of Twitter Promoted Products to the broader ecosystem.”
Harris also confirmed something we have known for a while: those developers will get a cut of the revenue it generates through Promoted Content in third-party apps. The company is “still working out the exact value” of the revenue split.
Earlier this month, Twitter unveiled Suggestions for You, a tool account holders can use to find other Twitter users with similar interests. The site also added Who to Follow, a section that lists people or organizations a user might be interested in.
This is a natural move for Twitter as a significant number of users access the site’s services through third party applications. One such application, TweetDeck recently reported that it had surpassed 15 million downloads for its desktop app and 2.5 million for its iPhone counterpart.
Tags: twitter, Twitter_Promoted_Tweets