Advertisers who wish to take advantage of Twitter and use it for the advertising and marketing tool it has evolved into will now have to pay more. Twitter just raised its fee to advertisers for "promoted trends" tweets to $200,000 a day. The cost of promoted trends in the U.S. today is now two and a half times the price back in 2010, $80,000 per day.
According to AllThingsD, Twitter marked up the promoted trends price by 33 percent from the fee charged last year: $150,000. When advertisers wish to reach a broader range of users, promoted tweets and promoted trends tweets help companies to attain that goal. For promoted tweets, Twitter, in exchange for a handsome fee from an advertiser, places the paid-for tweets at the top of relevant search results pages.
When a user searches for a particular topic, the promoted tweet stands out and is clearly distinguished from other tweets within the interface of the page. The promoted tweets only appear to the user if it is a topic likely to be relevant to the user.
Promoted trends provide advertisers with even more visibility, as the ad is placed at the top of Twitter's trending topics list. Some big-name brands use Twitter to promote and have their promoted ads featured including MTV (Viacom), Microsoft, Spike TV and Staples.
If Twitter can rake in daily advertising money for $200,000 a day, it could generate more than $70 million per year in the U.S. alone. What began as a free social networking and micro-blogging platform has turned into a multi-million dollar social media giant. Public figures, including celebrities, journalists and politicians, have established a significant presence on Twitter.
Since its launch in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and co-founders Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter has achieved worldwide popularity. At the end of December 2012, Twitter announced it had surpassed 200 million monthly active users. In 2010, Twitter began rolling out its ad platform offering companies a way to target existing and potential customers.
