Late last month, Twitter made an obvious choice by putting ads from companies we follow into our feeds. Good! Now they’ve taken it one step further by allowing ads from brands we don’t follow to slip through. Not so good?
Well, in truth it still makes some sense. It just gets a bit murky in the execution. Twitter is still iffy about throwing Promoted Tweets at you indiscriminately, hence why you only get them from companies you care about. This concept could have you seeing them from brands you may care about, based on how similar you are to the people who follow them already.
Twitter has been cagey on how this works, but it could resemble how the “Who to Follow” feature works. Say you really love The Real World and can’t wait for the new season, but for whatever reason don’t follow @MTV. If you follow someone who does or maybe retweet a bunch about how far you’ve gotten into the series, you may see some tweets directing you to show stuff and swag. And you’ll still be able to switch it off when you want. Clever.
If anything’s to be taken out of this, it’s that Twitter’s only getting started with their ad business. [AllThingsD]