Twitter has been trying to convince analysts that it can expand business outside of its own site, a statement that Wall Street find hard to believe. Despite the lack of support from the business community, Twitter announced its plan on Tuesday of going beyond the site by displaying "Promoted Tweets."
Promoted Tweets is the online social networking company's advertising product that will allow businesses to promote their products to more people, beyond the 284 million users of the Twitter. Current partners with Twitter include Flipboard and Yahoo Japan.
"For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," said Twitter senior product director Ameet Ranadive in a company blog post.
Twitter released statistics showing that they recorded 185 billion unique views outside the site and app between July and Sept. 2014 alone. These viewers do not have Twitter accounts, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Third-party partners such as Flipboard and Yahoo will also benefit from the new product as they will also receive new site visitors, which means additional ad dollars. The promoted tweet will appear in designated areas of their sites.
The revenue will be split among Twitter and its partners although details of the distribution were not disclosed, according to sources of Bloomberg. It is also uncertain if Promoted Tweets will attract more partners from here on.
The idea is a big one," Ian Schafer, CEO of the digital ad agency Deep Focus, told the Wall Street Journal. "If they can succeed in programming the Internet with ads driven by immediacy of data, that's a game changer for them and us. This is very promising."
Despite the uncertainty of whether Promoted Tweets will be successful, Twitter's stocks climbed by 6.5 percent to $39.90 on Tuesday after the announcement, according to Reuters. Twitter is yet to report its Q4 earnings.
