Advertising for Real-Time Search (aka Twitter)

By Steve Poland • March 3, 2009

Real-time search is going to change things up on the web. To me, real-time search is essentially “conversational search” — what are people talking about right now? What events, what trips they are planning at this moment, what answers they are trying to find to looming questions, etc.

Twitter is all about conversation and what people are doing now. Twitter has real-time search, but hasn’t made it widely available yet — imagine when Twitter puts this search box at the top of every Twitter page; it’s going to be a game changer.

Some companies have been trying various methods of helping users of Twitter make some money, but generally putting ads in their feeds. I think this will work if they insert a link that is 100% relevant to what ever the person is tweeting about.

But what really needs to happen is another Google AdWords, but for real-time search. Text ads to people doing real-time search queries, are going to read/look different than search queries at a search engine. Some company needs to start figuring out what these ads are going to read/look like — and also how people will be searching the real-time web, because it’s going to look much different than their search habits on Google. People will use different keywords/phrases and ways of phrasing their queries.

Some searches will stay the same (i.e. “tickets for Purdue Ohio State game”), but others will change (i.e. instead of “hotel recommendations in Buffalo NY”, they might search on how others would be saying it, “hotel great Buffalo NY” — to get people twittering ‘The Mansion Hotel has been great in Buffalo NY!’).

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Comments

5 Responses to “Advertising for Real-Time Search (aka Twitter)”

Rex Dixon on March 3rd, 2009 12:30 pm (perm link)

I even saw this morning some new green gadget where you can control your thermostat via tweeting. I just wrote a blog post on siliconANGLE about twitter ( http://www.siliconangle.com/social-media/not-quite-mainstream-twitter/ ) – when will it be mainstream? I think Evan is just being very humble, it won’t be 5 years – a lot less than that!

Rex
This is how Twitter will monetize | Smith On VoIP on March 4th, 2009 1:11 am (perm link)

[...] Enjoy the post.This started out as a comment on fellow Twitter connoisseur Steve Poland’s Advertising for Real Time Search (aka Twitter) post that when finally completed was worthy of a blog [...]
This is how Twitter will monetize | Voip Blog on March 6th, 2009 1:12 pm (perm link)

[...] started out as a comment on fellow Twitter connoisseur Steve Poland’s Advertising for Real Time Search (aka Twitter) post that when finally completed was worthy of a blog [...]
This is how Twitter will monetize | Telecom Update on March 31st, 2009 8:14 am (perm link)

[...] started out as a comment on fellow Twitter connoisseur Steve Poland’s Advertising for Real Time Search (aka Twitter) post that when finally completed was worthy of a blog [...]
flyff gold on June 15th, 2009 10:27 pm (perm link)

Great article. Thanks for the great resource.