As you will probably have heard by now, Twitter have finally bitten the bullet and begun to monetise their site by allowing companies to rise above the wave of constant conversation using ‘promoted tweets’.

This system will work in a very similar way to Google Adwords, with companies being able to bid on strategic keywords and these ‘promoted tweets’ will stay visible in the stream for far longer than your average tweet.

This is good news for advertisers – especially those with a brand name that gets mentioned a lot in other contexts (mini, office, apple) allowing them more exposure on their brand terms.

However when you look into the previous ways Twitter has made money from the site (feed deals with Google, Yahoo, Bing) it does bring up a couple of interesting questions.

Firstly – will promoted tweets feature in the real time search feeds?

It’s currently pretty easy* to use twitter/real time search to plonk your site down on the front page of Google.

Now a paid front page link on Google that stays there for quite some time – with Google getting none of the cash? That ain’t happening any time soon. So Google’s response will be exciting to watch.

Secondly if this becomes successful, does twitter become a serious threat to Google’s search business? Twitter is already far better when it comes to shock announcements and real time search – check this analysis of the Apple iAds launch. If it is able to provide a strong ad platform alongside this to bring in a revenue feed are we likely to see more people going direct to twitter for search queries rather than Google? Or would Google just see this as the point to step in and flash the cash?

Thoughts?

*provided you have an army of monkeys updating 1,000 twitter accounts – not a recommended strategy by the way!

EDIT: Since writing this blog, I’ve investigated the ‘starbucks’ real time search window (paint drying anyone?) and it certainly looks as if twitter aren’t providing promoted tweats in their external feeds.

The secondary result of this though is still the same – companies are spending money with someone else, to get more favourable search results on Google.

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