March 2, 2010 (CAP Newswire) – Twitter, the online social networking hub that, along with Facebook, has been dominating Internet business headlines in recent years, is raising the stakes in its bid to become not only a cultural online hotspot but also a premier Internet money-maker. Hot on the heels of recent high-profile deals with virtually every major search engine company, Twitter has announced that it plans to monetize its search results in a style very similar to Google AdWords.
The plan is to sell ads that will be delivered via Twitter searches. Like the “tweets” themselves, these ads will be restricted to 140 characters or less. (Criticism that this may pose a problem for businesses should consider just how much successful communication Twitter currently enables within those same limitations.)
But will it work? Is Twitter overstepping its core strengths? Will users plug in to the new plan, or be turned off? Most observers are optimistic. “This is a bit of a no-brainer for Twitter,” according to the Twittercism blog. “It’s really too early to speculate about the consequences of all of this without more information, but I do have one question: will the option to advertise be open to everybody, like it is with Google’s Adsense program, or is Twitter going to continue the form it has shown with the suggested user list and verified users, and only offer this service to their personal favourites?” As of right now, these questions remain unanswered.
And so, time will tell. But it’s reasonable to assume that, if implemented, this change will represent a big shift in the way that Twitter’s social marketing dynamics work in the larger online business world. And the big question for the online gambling affiliate marketing community is: Does this kind of advertising fit in with basic online marketing strategies? Does it complement more traditional AdWords-style advertising, or compete with it? Is there room for both?