Watch Twitter Carefully over the Next 12 Months as it Looks for Ways to Become a Profitable Company

Businesses looking to achieve a high website ranking may have noticed that a new feature has been added to Twitter - promoted tweets, the social networking site's new advertising platform.

Twitter has been trying to find ways to monetise the site for some time and hopes that this platform is the answer: users who click on a promoted tweet are taken to the normal trending results page, where the advertiser's tweet remains at the top.

Launched on June 17 2010, the first promoted tweet was an advert for Disney Pixar's new release, Toy Story 3, which leads users to a stream of tweets related to the sequel.

Twitter may be planning more advanced ways to monetise the site, but only after this idea has been evaluated.  "Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of promoted tweets, user experience and advertiser value," it said.

According to Kevin Gibbons from Search Engine Watch, marketing through social media badly is worse than not doing it at all.  He suggests drawing up a list of ground rules, particularly relating to Twitter and making sure everybody using the company account understands them before launching a campaign.