Twitter Retires the Early Bird Advertisement Product
Today at the IAB Mixx conference, Twitter COO Dick Costolo announced that the Twitter Early Bird program would be retired. The advertising program allowed advertisers to make product announcements directly to Twitter users through one centralized account, @EarlyBird. Virgin American and Disney were companies that took advantage of the program but most offers were only for the American market which Twitter felt was alienating to international users.
The Early Bird program will be replaced with an upcoming Promoted Products program according to Mashable earlier today. Running for several months, the daily/weekly deals account attracted 230,000 followers but didn’t provide the kind of deals that many consumers had hoped for. The most popular offer made on the Early Bird account was by JetBlue which offered 20% discounts on airline tickets and sold 1,000 within a ten hour period.
The experiment with Early Bird becomes a learning experience for the company as they move to monetize the Twitter service in different ways. The company hopes to offer deals more closely related to conversations that are occurring on Twitter in the future. Contextual advertising is popular among many online merchants and add networks today.
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