What Does a Promoted Trend on Twitter Mean?

Jack Dorsey founded Twitter in 2006; the company launched its ad platform in 2010.

Twitter’s homepage is a study in simplicity; a continuous stream of tweets takes center stage, and a smaller column on the left contains links, suggested users and trending topics. Made conspicuous by its absence is the presence of noticeable advertising of any sort: no banner ads, no popups and no loud videos auto-playing in a corner of the page. But, like any company hoping to be profitable, Twitter needs a source of revenue, and that’s where Promoted Trends enter the picture. A spinoff of its Promoted Tweets advertising platform, Promoted Trends allow advertisers to expose their businesses to a wide audience and engage users in a conversation about their company or product.

About Trends

According to Twitter’s official blog, the trends list is made up of the “hottest emerging topics.” These are topics suddenly seeing a dramatic increase in activity as compared to the typical number of tweets about the subject. Twitter uses an algorithm to identify popular topics in your selected location and displays a list of trends in the left column of your Twitter homepage. When you click on a trend, you’re taken to a page containing all of the tweets about that particular topic. Sometimes tweeters use a hashtag – a "#" placed next to a keyword – to indicate that the tweet relates to a specific topic, but hashtagging isn’t necessary for a topic to start trending.

About Promoted Trends

Twitter launched Promoted Trends in 2010 as part of its Promoted suite of advertising products, which also includes Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. Unlike regular trends, which are organic in nature, Promoted Trends don’t start out as popular topics; they’re bought and paid for by advertisers. Adam Bain, Twitter’s director of revenue, said in a June 2011 interview with ClickZ that the daily cost of a promoted trend had risen to $120,000 from an initial $25,000 to $30,000. They benefit advertisers by engaging users in a conversation about the brand, sending traffic to the advertiser’s website via a link and exposing the brand to a multitude of potential followers.

How They Work

Promoted Trends appear at the top of the trends list on a user’s homepage and consist of a hashtag with an orange arrow and the word “Promoted” next to it. When a user clicks on the promoted trend, a page of search results for that topic loads with the advertiser’s tweet at the top followed by tweets from users responding to the trend. Promoted Trends appear on the Twitter website, in the mobile applications for iOS and Android and in TweetDeck, and are available to all users during the promotional period. Promoted Trends are still considered a beta project and are only available to a small group of advertisers as of June 2012.

Results

The platform has proven successful for several advertisers, according to case studies on Twitter’s business site. A UK campaign for Cadbury’s Wispa Gold chocolate bar increased positive mentions of the candy bar (using the hashtag #WispaGold) by 1,800 percent. Porsche’s promoted trend for the 2012 911 saw an 80 percent engagement rate – meaning that eight out of 10 people who saw the trend interacted with it in some manner – and increased the company’s followers by 594 percent. In a 2010 interview with “The Financial Times,” Carol Kruse -- Coca Cola’s vice-president for global interactive marketing -- said that the company saw “phenomenal” results from their Promoted Trend campaign.

References

• Twitter Help Center: About Twitter Trends
• Twitter Blog: To Trend Or Not To Trend...
• Twitter for Business: Advertise With Promoted Trends
• ClickZ: Twitter Builds U.S. Sales Force, Eyes Japan
• Twitter Help Center: What Are Promoted Trends?
• Twitter Blog: Promoted Promotions
• Twitter For Business: Cadbury Case Study
• Twitter For Business: Porsche Case Study
• The Financial Times: Coke Sees "Phenomenal" Result From Twitter Ads
• GigaOM: When Is a Twitter Trend Not a Trend? When It's Promoted