Promoted Tweets: Should Twitter be “playing Google”?

By now you’ve heard the big news – Twitter has (another) business model!!  It’s always slightly amused me how venture capital money can build companies that can bring the internet to a standstill with announcements like “hey everybody – we have a plan to maybe make some of that money back!”.   And when Twitter announced Promoted Tweets, that’s exactly what happened.  It caused everyday Twitterati to gossip, quip and chatter.  It caused brands to ask questions.  It caused agencies to create “official positions”.  And rightfully so – we could be witnessing the birth of the next Google, right?

Right?

Well let me just take this opportunity to play the devil’s advocate.  Interestingly, in this scenario, I suppose the devil would be Google…
First off, it’s hard to argue that Promoted Tweets isn’t an important step in Twitter’s evolution.  That said, from the devil’s standpoint, it may ultimately be step that causes us all to realize – Twitter simply isn’t Google.  And it never will be.  It’s just too specialized of a service. And as a specialized service, they have a niche audience.  This fact makes it virtually impossible for Promoted Tweets to compete with Google Ad Words, both from a volume perspective, as well as from use case perspective.

Let’s take a look:

From the volume side of that equation, there are 55 million tweets generated on twitter daily according to stats widely released at this month’s Chirp Twitter Developer’s Conference.  If that’s the system volume, what is the search volume?  Well, glad I asked.  At Chirp, they announced that there are over 600 million search queries per day!!  What???  A system that’s core function is “tweeting” produces almost 11X as many searches as tweets on a daily basis???  Not quite.

As @ev will be the first to admit, this number has been lovingly augmented by API calls – third party sites using Twitter’s data for their own purposes.  Consider the massive volume of searches that are regularly performed by brands through such services as  Radian6, as well as “searches” that occur on an ongoing basis through services like Hootsuite when tracking a hashtag or a user.

So what kind of volume are we really talking considering actual users (including bots) generate only 55 million tweets per day?  A few million queries?  Maybe 10 tops?  Whatever that number is would be divided between every possible brand, product, event and salesman on the platform.  And that’s before we even begin to measure if anyone is actually paying attention to them, tolerating them, or clicking on them – not a compelling case for world domination.  And yes, Twitter is growing quickly, but how far do they have to go to catch up to the billions of users that query Google search – that product’s sole function – on a daily basis?

Then we begin to consider the use case.  Most twitter searches from the “general public” are done around people or events, rather than products/brands.  The reality is, Twitter is a different kind of platform than Google where trending topics are usually things like “Justin Bieber”, and not “Pepsi”.  This is great if you’re selling Justin Bieber CD’s, but if you’re anyone from Joe the local handyman to the Home Depot, who can effectively use Google Ad Words to drive customers, you’re not flocking to twitter to leverage Promoted Tweets – people just aren’t looking for you there.  It’s not how they use the platform.

Subsequently (and presumably to combat this volume problem), Twitter has announced they’ll eventually expand Promoted Tweets outside of search.  But will this be a good thing for their user?  Twitter is a niche platform with people looking for specific information in a specific context.  Will they take kindly to advertising invading that hallowed space?  How will they avoid these tweets coming off like spam when no query has been made by the user?  What’s more, from a user data standpoint, Twitter knows FAR less about its users than Google or Facebook.  So what are the odds they’ll actually be able to target individuals with ads they might find relevant, as we often see in Gmail or on Facebook (and even then with varied success)?  Not good, I’d bet.

For all these reasons, there seems to be a compelling argument that Promoted Tweets won’t completely”change the game”.  I’ve certainly been wrong before, but it seems this won’t be the product that catapults Twitter beyond Google, or even Facebook, to a place of financial dominance in the online world.  That said, it’s an important step for Twitter, and likely something they needed to do.  I only hope that they watch their step on the road to commercialization, before they begin to drive away what they have now – a passionate, highly engaged niche audience.

And that has to be worth something.

What do you think?  Are there any other devil’s out there?  Let me know…

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