I’m just wandering how many people have recently logged onto twitter, seen the blue bar at the top of their screen, read ‘Pssst... the new version of Twitter is here’ and thought ‘oh yea, i’d heard something about that’ and have clicked the try it now button.The new twitter has certainly been a hot talking point, just check #newtwitter.

Now my thinking is that Twitter are getting some very accurate live data out of how many people are having a look at the new Twitter, spending a small time playing about THEN reverting back to the old screen. Thinking ‘Phew! Not ready for all that quite yet!’ The simplicity has somewhat been lost, if Twitter users wanted a media integrated service would they just not choose Facebook?

The main premise of Twitter is SIMPLE. Just 140 characters of text that’s it. Nothing too complex about all that. Are Twitter trying to fix what isn’t broken? Well no, more realistically they are trying to gain more revenue and this new format is much more conducive for online marketing and brand promotion through the sale of sponsored tweets and advertising.

As an advertiser paying to promote a number of Tweets I would be 10 times more likely to cough up the money if I knew the following. That, not only will my tweet reach no end of users, but when this great number of Twitter users see the promoted Tweet, it has a visual tag attached. This may contain a brand name, a caption or a video on the same screen. This is clearly neat work from Twitter and I’m sure it may only be a matter of time before the initial shock of change has worn off and we’re all on our way tweeting again. (With a backdrop of subconscious advertising being cleverly played around us.)

Personally I use Tweet Deck and rarely use the main Twitter site. There is a great deal of add on software for Twitter that makes the process much more pleasurable. According to Ad age, “Twitter plans in November 2010 to take its ads beyond Twitter.com and extend them to the rest of the user base through apps such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite.”

So the future of promoted tweets and advertising by Twitter will be available on all third party apps. This makes perfect marketing sense and will see the rise of a new form of Social Media advertising far surpassing the marketing power of a Facebook ad.

Twitter advertising is a great platform to not only spread the word about a new product or service but get an instant response from an immense number of people and begin new conversations.