Paid Tweets on Twitter: A New Strategy to Increase Ad Revenue?

Twitter has included paid tweets from companies which are not so popular on the micro-blog site. It started showing ads from these companies from Tuesday.

Twitter, in a blog post, said that the new program is being tested with just a handful of companies.

The companies whose promotional tweets began rolling out includes AMC, Theatre, American Express, Best Western, Disney, HP, Lexus, Lionsgate, Movietickets.com, Pepsi, Red Bull, Salesforce.com, Sephora, Xbox and Yahoo.

These companies pay twitter every time an action is taken on that promotional tweet. It could be a reply to the tweet, if someone follows or re-tweets it, and each click on the tweet is counted.

Twitter definitely has plans of minting huge amounts of ad revenue by these “promotional tweets.” Is this a new strategy to increase ad revenue? Or as per the company blog, is it a genuine step of “introducing services to enrich the twitter experience for every Twitter user?”

Twitter first announced this initiative in July 2011, to promote “modern advertising” through social networking sites, giving brands a way to pay for tweets near or at the top of their followers’ timeline.

Now with the new initiative, people will see tweets from all the companies running a paid program, unlike the previous one in which they could only see paid tweets from companies they were following.

Twitter says it will roll out the program gradually, beginning with a small percentage of users.