Twitter has announced the first parts of how it intends to make money. The Microblogging service that has taken the social media world by storm and has circa of 75 million Users has announced that it will be serving up a form of Tweet Advertising – a Tweetvert – that will appear when doing a Twitter search. The official name is Promoted Tweet and it will be restricted to a small number of partners on its initial launch.

Their take on this Google-esque adwords-like search advertising is that the primary form of this advert will be a standard Tweet. Advertisers will be limited to the same 140 characters that a standard tweet is composed of and they will pay to have it placed at the top of a Twitter search results page. Some have claimed that there could be issues with only having access to 140 characters to promote something, but personally I don’t think this is much of an issue, as this limited text usage has been a key part of the highly successful Adwords system used by Google for over a decade now and as we all know – this racks in the billions that power the Google empire.

Think how powerful it will be to have a market of 75 million eyeballs all looking at your Tweetvert

Twitter search is still very much in its infancy but this will change. The social stream and the emerging real-time flux that people are now absorbing as part of their daily info-consumption is only going to grow. Everyday more people join a social network. Just as web searching went from convenience in the early 2000′s to being the primary form of finding and locating on the web – so will this happen for social search. The difference is that this is not dominated by Google but by the social players Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, Google needs to start getting nervous on this. People are shifting on how they are engaging with the web – mobile is changing their patterns (as Steve Jobs so adamantly noted when he said no one searches on mobile – the truth of this to be determined) but so is social networking – it is possible now to simply keep abreast of news and events by following your social stream and information now comes to me via those associations whether it be from Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn – in other words – I don’t need to search for it – IT is already in my social timeline – I just need to click the link and I am there.

So how will this all work? Phase 1 of the Twitter model is putting a promoted advertising tweet at the top of tweet search results (again similar to the top spot in Google Adwords). However, it is not as simple as just putting it into the top spot by paying the big dollars for it – the Tweetverts will be subject to a value and relevance to the Twitter community and is so subject to a thing that Twitter calls ‘Resonance’. If the Tweetvert is not getting many clicks, being retweeted or getting negative feedback then Twitter will pull it.

Example of the new Twitter Tweetverts

This ‘Resonance’ is going to be interesting – I like the idea of it but it also sounds a little ethereal and doesn’t have the clear cut maths that drives Adwords via the ‘clicks vs bids’ model. That said, if they get it right it could be huge because what Twitter has is potentially the ability to monitor the feelings or vibes in its Twitterverse and adjust adverts as these feelings/vibes shift.

Phase 2 could be more interesting again. This involves introducing the Tweetvert into a Users timeline – this means that as I scan my tweet updates for what my Followers are tweeting about I will every so often encounter one of these promoted tweets.

Think how powerful it will be to have a market of 75 million eyeballs all looking at your Tweetvert; and no doubt it will evolve to allow people to create profiles of the types of Tweetverts they like – think of it as a reverse model of the targeting profiles an Adwords User can currently setup.

There has been some stiff criticism, from lack of originality to mega-fail – some people likening the idea of Tweetverts in their timeline to that of television adverts – an old model they think should stay in the past.

It is probably too early to judge but I think it will be a winner – as I mentioned there are some interesting aspects too it and it will need to mature and bed in; until then, how successful or not the Tweetvert will be is still an unknown.