Dive Brief:
- Borrowing from Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is now testing a new ad unit, Promoted Tweet Carousel.
- The ads allow marketers to curate multiple tweets into a single swipeable ad to lend a more storytelling feel to ads that isn’t possible with a single promoted tweet.
- While Twitter has been actively making changes and adding new ad units to its offerings, the carousel ad format has already seen wide success on Facebook and Instagram.
Big news! Curate multiple Tweets in a single swipeable ad unithttps://t.co/l0WTGVtI4O
— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) June 3, 2016
Dive Insight:
Carousel ads have worked because of their dynamic quality, which is more attention grabbing than simple static images. In fact, users are 10 times more likely to engage with a carousel ad than other ad formats.
"Since people tweet about their favorite brands and products every day, we developed this powerful solution to help marketers leverage social recommendations," Twitter explained in a blog post.
Promoted Tweet Carousels can include tweets with rich media such as images or video, and marketers can even tap content from niche creators and combine that with tweets from Twitter users that have authorized advertisers to use those tweets. A number of brands are already taking advantage of the new format including Disney, Volvo and Gatorade.
John Militello, director of marketing for Volvo Car USA, was quoted in the same Twitter blog post saying, “How we communicate with our tribe needs to be just as innovative as the cars we build. We embrace platforms that have the same purpose as we do — putting people first. Twitter’s new Promoted Tweet Carousel helps us show multiple videos within one unit, and this is a great opportunity for Volvo and Twitter to continue partnering in a way that doesn’t interrupt the user.”
Currently Promoted Tweet Carousel ads are only available to select accounts in select global marketing in a limited alpha test.
