Twitter just announced that it will now be showing Promoted Accounts in search results.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter’s ad formats, well, the names are pretty self-explanatory. A Promoted Account is an account that businesses pay to advertise to users (and hopefully gain more followers), versus a Promoted Tweet or a Promoted Trend (the latter is a relatively small part of company revenue).
This shouldn’t be a dramatic change for users, since Promoted Tweets were already displayed in search. This just means that search results will include another type of ad unit, one that was already showing up in users’ Twitter timelines.
Still, this should help the company monetize user searches. As Twitter’s growth and “timeline views” (a measure of user engagement) have slowed or declined, Twitter has argued that each view is becoming more valuable (and yes, it plans to address user growth, too).
“We automatically select relevant search queries for presenting Promoted Accounts based on an advertiser’s targeting choices, so no additional action is required for your business to access this capability,” Twitter says.
You can read more in the company’s blog post.