Twitter Preparing for Promoted Tweets in Third-Party Apps

Twitter is preparing itself and its developers for the rollout of its ad platforms, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends, within third-party applications, starting with desktop apps.

The company has made an update to its application programming interface (API) that gives developers access to two new fields related to Promoted Tweets and Trends. These data points aren’t ready for primetime though; it will be some time until you actually see Promoted Tweets in TweetDeck, Seesmic or other third-party apps.

“Over the next few months, we will begin beta testing with a handful of desktop applications,” said Twitter Developer Advocate Matt Harris in a post on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group. “During this period, we aim to learn a lot, and we will apply those lessons when we expand distribution of Twitter Promoted Products to the broader ecosystem.”

Harris also confirmed something we have known for a while: that developers will get a cut of the revenue it generates through Promoted Content in third-party apps. The company is “still working out the exact value” of the revenue split.
Twitter first rolled out its ad platform in April with Virgin America, Bravo and Starbucks as its initial customers. In June, the company launched Promoted Trends. Coca-Cola, one of the early customers of the product, reported that Promoted Trends netted it 86 million impressions.