Example of promoted Tweet on Twitter

Search Engine Land recently reported on a Disney Pixar’s use of the Twitter ‘Promoted Tweets’ functionality in order to ‘artificially’ get ‘Toy Story 3’ in to the list of trending topics…

Whilst Pixar had to pay to get the term in to the list (all be it at the bottom), what is interesting here is the word ‘promoted’.  They were only able to promote this term due to the fact that it was popular anyway (although not organically in the top ten).  

This is a clever mechanism from Twitter for showing paid ‘ads’ which avoid being spammy due to the fact that they are relevant to what users are actually discussing anyway.

Chris Moore is a Program Manager working on Search Engine Optimisation at Microsoft.  Follow him on Twitter