Twitter has slowly been incorporating ads into the tweeting experience since last year, and starting today, Promoted Tweets will start showing up in the stream of tweets from people you follow.
Hopefully the effort won't clutter your timeline too much; Twitter said you'll only see Promoted Tweets from sponsors on your follow list. They'll appear on your feed like other tweets and only show up once. They can also be dismissed with one click. "When we decide to follow a favorite brand, business or charitable organization, we expect to be among the first to get a special announcement, access to exclusive content or a great offer," the company said in a blog post.
The micro-blogging site said it will be rolling out and testing the service in the next few weeks with several partners, including Best Western, Dell, Gatorade, Groupon, HBO, JetBlue, LivingSocial, Microsoft Xbox, Red Bull, Sephora, Starbucks, Summit Entertainment's "50/50," TNT, and Virgin America, among others. Twitter will also run ads for non-profits like charity:water, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Room to Read, The American Red Cross, and Water.org.
Twitter first announced its Promoted Tweets ad platform in April 2010. At the time, it partnered with several specific advertisers, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America. If you happened to search for those brands on Twitter, the top search result would be an ad from those sponsors. At launch, Promoted Tweets were only included in search results, but Twitter said it would eventually expand the program. By June, it added those Promoted Tweets to its trending topics bar.
In October, Twitter officially unveiled its Promoted Accounts program, which added advertisers to Twitter's "Who to Follow" suggestions list. It also announced a "promoted products" option that allowed third-party apps to display promoted tweets and trends.
"From the start, our philosophy around advertising has been simple: We put our users first and strive to create products that enrich the Twitter experience for every Twitter user," Twitter said Thursday.