Twitter bans paid tweets

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 25 May 2010 05:46

Business IT - Technology

Twitter has forbidden the posting of paid tweets by third parties via the Twitter API.

Having recently introduced Promoted Tweets, Twitter is working to stamp out the practice of paying third parties to tweet.

Promoted Tweets are messages that the sender has paid to be emphasised by Twitter in certain search results. In other respects, they are the same as any other tweet.

Announcing Promoted Tweets last month, Twitter founder Biz Stone stated "if users don't interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear."

Promoted Tweets were one of Twitter's first steps towards commercialisation, and the company doesn't want other businesses taking advantage of the platform by charging others for posting messages.

"It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API," A Twitter spokesperson stated.

What's Twitter's justification for the ruling? Find out on page 2.