Twitter is testing a new potential money-making feature: Promoted Trends. The first promotion is “Toy Story 3″ from Disney’s Pixar.
Twitter, which allows advertisers to insert messages into users’ streams through a program called Promoted Tweets, is also exploring the idea of selling its trending feature, which highlights topics popular with its users.
The concept is simple: Advertisers insert their own trend to display on users’ home pages. A big yellow box alerts users that the topic is promoted, not organic. If you click on the link, it takes you to a search results page to see what people are saying about the film.
“As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts. As part of this effort, today we began testing Promoted Trends, which is an extension of our Promoted Tweets platform,” a Twitter spokeswoman said. “These Promoted Trends initially appear at the bottom of the Trending Topics list on Twitter and are clearly marked ‘Promoted.’ As conversations about the topic increase, Promoted Trends may move up the list.”
