In another world, Twitter advertising works like this

Ah, Twitter for Businesses. Such a comprehensive guide for Businesses or Brands to successfully market themselves on Twitter – Creating a great Twitter presence, Engaging users, Attracting Followers and the finishing move – Twitter Ads! Success!

This is Twitter advertising as we know it today. Every business has a twitter handle, every brand is running a contest.

Funnily though, none of these ever reach me. Ever.

My struggle with information overload makes me pretty choosy about who I follow. Only people who tweet great stuff regularly stay on my timeline. Pruning and unfollowing is a weekly activity. To me, Twitter handles of these brands are either dispensable or overlooked without a blink.

I expect this to catch up. We live in a world which hyper-shares. We have irrelevant and uninteresting information thrown at us every day on our social networks. Twitter and its ‘Follow’ model is a huge respite. Everybody either ignores or is choosy.

Now let me tell you what happened to me last month - #shubhaarambh did – a promoted hashtag which popped up quite regularly on my Twitter timeline.

The question now is how?

Here’s how - Rohan Joshi (@mojorojo) is a funny guy. He’s one of the few folks who have stayed and made my Twitter timeline consistently entertaining. Turns out he was tweeting with #shubhaarambh all along slyly placing it in his humour filled tweets. Netra Parikh (@netra) is another quintessential on my timeline who tweets really helpful stuff for Mumbai folks. Turns out she was tweeting #shubhaarambh too.

It was actually for a contest by Cadbury. Well done Cadbury, you have gone where no brand has gone before – My timeline! You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.

So what does this tell me? Maybe Twitter, there’s a different way you could do advertising.

Let me make a small analogy to explain my idea - @mojorojo, and @netra are like quality television channels like ABC, FOX or Star Plus with popular content like TV shows in primetime programming both engaging and entertaining. These shows have ads!

While watching these TV shows, commercial breaks don’t hurt and I actually end up consuming some advertising when I’m hooked to them. Similarly, if these Twitter users tweeted some stuff bearing promoted content, I’m also very likely to consume it while I’m hooked to their stream. They have my attention and their tweets seldom get overlooked.

In contrast, dedicated accounts for businesses on Twitter are like post 12 am infomercial channels - dedicated to just one product and more likely to be ignored. No entertainment, only ads.

So aren’t tweets bearing promoted content by these users a much better way to advertise on Twitter?

My friend Tejas revealed that celebrities are already tweeting promoted content. What’s more, I ran into this website -  

@mojorojo features on this list at $77, so does @hoezaay, a similar twitter user at $177.

And here I am thinking - Maybe you should be doing this Twitter.

Twitter has the power to make advertising non-invasive, seamless and engaging. Along with or instead of selling promoted tweets and accounts, Twitter can help connect brands to influential Twitter users and promote this model of advertising.

Twitter can easily possess the ability to identify influential users in every demographic, their model of engagement and topics, keywords associated with these users. Twitter can also determine spheres of influence of these content creators to reduce redundancy and improve coverage. It just needs to map influential Twitter users with a target rich audience to the brand of the advertiser.

Twitter now becomes a marketplace for connecting these two parties and takes a cut at both ends based on the effectiveness of the campaign.

It can and should also do one more thing – Grow its own superstars! The easy and obvious choice for this form of advertising are Celebrities. They are well-known, have huge followings on Twitter and have an image the brand can capitalize on. But most celebrities tweet infrequently with content which merely has fan-value. Instead, Twitter should take the lead in promoting Twitter users whose influence is growing. It needs to grow more channels in each demographic and bank on these channels to provide more opportunities of advertising to their advertisers.

Moreover, these content creators can not only be channels but also ad-men. Creating effective content for advertisers should come to them as naturally as tweeting.

These content creators are at the soul of Twitter. They share their opinions, laughs, experiences and curiosities to make Twitter what it is - entertaining. Twitter needs to reward them for their contribution.

All in all - It’s a win-win. The advertisers get a more engaging way to market with tailored content from creators which the audience likes and anticipates. Imagine @mohanstatsman talking about a contest to be in the Pepsi VIP box blended into his cricket trivia.

The Content-creators get real value in being on twitter and creating a dedicated followership.

Twitter gets an entirely new model of advertising and increased Twitter activity from this incentive.

Target audience like me will truly get to choose the advertising they want to subscribe by extension of deciding whom to follow.

Of course this will create it’s own set of behaviors and concerns – Brands will have to figure out how to retain their identity when they engage in this model, content creators would really have to be smart about the number and kind of sponsorship they take up and so on.

But it’s still worth a shot!

Thanks Teja for your inputs! 

PS - This is just a pondering. If any of you know about how Twitter does this already, please feel free to share. Thanks