It’s been a long time coming, but Twitter has finally started utilizing promoted tweets. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter (and/or that last sentence made no sense to you) don’t feel bad, it just means that you have better things to do than reducing your life into 140 characters at a time – that said, I am a Twitter fanatic.

To truly understand the importance of promoted topics, you really need to understand the power of having a topic trend on Twitter. Luckily, Twitter’s own site does a pretty good job of explaining itself. This entry in particular does a good job of explaining the power of trending topics.

For marketers, promoted tweets mean a lot of things. Most importantly, they give businesses a way to direct the conversation surrounding their brand. In the past, marketing items on Twitter in such a way so that they trend has been nearly impossible. Even when a topic receives a lot of attention, it’s rarely able to trend with such topics as “Justin Bieber” or “Your mommas so ugly.” With promoted tweets, marketers have a much better chance of being seen and therefore trending. The specifics of promoted tweets are fairly complicated, but Twitter’s recent blog explains how influential they can be, as well as what the future holds in store.

Thanks for reading,

-@allansteiner