Twitter wants to let brands turn your tweets into ads

Twitter is developing an ad format that will enable marketers to leverage your tweets in their brand campaigns. A source familiar with the matter tells VentureBeat that the company has begun testing a product called the “brand enthusiast gallery” with the goal of letting advertisers identify positive tweets about a brand or product and syndicate it in their ads.

First reported by Digiday, this new tool is another step by Twitter to give marketers ways to promote their product through ordinary people, instead of just through celebrities.

With marketers looking to launch campaigns on Twitter, the ability to tap into real-time conversations can be critical, both for the company and the advertiser. Twitter needs to show more reasons why brands should care about its offering, especially when investors are wary about its future.

Once a positive tweet has been identified, the brand enthusiast gallery allows marketers to send a direct message to the tweet author to request permission to share the post in an ad campaign. How exactly a positive post is identified remains unknown, but likely there’s a human involved to determine sentiment. And if not, will the automated process be able to discern sarcasm from honest conversation?

This soon-to-be released ad format was unveiled to advertisers at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, most likely at Twitter’s theme park-like meeting space. Digiday said that the ad unit will be a standard tweet from an advertiser “on top of a carousel of related tweets from users,” which seems to indicate an expansion of the carousel ads that Twitter started experimenting with in 2015.

It’s another effort by the company to show its strength in giving brands a way to capitalize on the chatter taking place on its service. Last week, Twitter rolled out conversational ads that promise to provide more brand engagement through a single click.

Twitter declined to comment for this story.