Twitter launches advertising program

BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhuanet) -- Micro-blogging service Twitter Tuesday unveiled an advertising program, taking a first step to turn its popularity into profit.

The new advertising service, named "Promoted Tweets," will allow companies to place a less-than-140-character message at the top of pages of search results, wrote Biz Stone, one of Twitter's co-founders, in a post on the company's blog.

Twitter said that it was currently testing Promoted Tweets with a number of advertisers including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America.

Under the program, one "Promoted Tweet", such as a sponsored message from Starbucks, will appear at the top of a search result page on Twitter for keywords that companies specifically purchase from Twitter.

Josh Bernoff, an analyst with U.S. marketing research company Forrester Research, estimated the new ad service could provide Twitter with 100 million U.S. dollars a year in revenue.

Twitter, on which users can send short text messages called "Tweets" to "followers," has become one of the most popular social networking services on the Internet since it was launched in August 2006.

But the San Francisco-based company has been slow to add a money-making aspect to its service, while it has received tens of millions of dollars from venture capital firms since its launch.

So far, the company has never released figures on its number of users. But marketing research company comScore said the website had 22.3 million unique visitors in March in the United States, up 140 percent year-over-year.