Jeremiah Owyang recently posted about promoted Tweets, and since Twitter has started the program you may have seen other notable people in the social media industry also tweeting about this change. So how does it effect small business, or more realistically how can small business capitalize on it?
The way it seems to work is that if you do a Google search, you’ll also see promoted tweets show up on the search and you’ll even be able to respond to them from that interface. The benefit is that if you’re offering something interesting, you can actually get a written response, and possibly get a link clicked as well.
Initially this looks like a tool that will be better for enterprise level businesses that have a lot more funding to promote their tweets. As far as I can tell, there’s not really a small business package. Additionally, at this time Twitter hasn’t fully implemented all the features that will go into promoted tweets, such as the resonance metric which judges the reach and impact individual sponsored tweets have, based on favorites, retweets, and views. Consequently this may not be such a useful tool for small or even mid-size businesses.
At this point, it’s too early to tell what effect, if any, promoted tweets will have on small business. Regardless small businesses shouldn’t stop tweeting anytime soon, because even with promoted tweets, it’s not really about the promotion, so much as its about the relationship.
