Twitter Bets on Facebook-Style Install Ads to Bring in Revenue

You can call it copying or you can call it borrowing, but the “swapping” of ideas between Facebook and Twitter over the past year has been fascinating to see unfold. Facebook copied Twitter’s hashtags and trending topics, and then Twitter copied Facebook’s profile pages and automatic image loading.

Now, Twitter is betting that borrowing one of Facebook’s many advertising models may help bolster the company’s cashflow – and that’s through application install ads.

These advertisements are pretty much what you’d expect: tweet-sized ads that appear in your feed that recommend a download of a new app for your phone. You might also see a recommendation to crack open an app you haven’t used in a while.

From a business perspective, these are a great, direct way to access new customers and put potentially useful products in front of them. As far as how well it’s worked for Facebook, company founder Mark Zuckerberg mentioned earlier this year that they’re quite a success.

“We’re finding that people also really want to buy a lot of app install ads, and that’s grown incredibly quickly and is one of the best parts of the ad work that we did over the last year.”

If you’re an advertiser looking to publish ads on Twitter through this system, Twitter has made it available through a single tool that can put your ad in front of a potential user-base of 241 million Tweeters.

This news comes as little surprise after the company’s acquisition of advertising exchange MoPup last October. Kevin Weil, Twitter’s VP of Product and Revenue, says the connection between the two, because of this new model, has been solidified.

“The power of this is about the scalability and the flexibility of being able to configure your app install campaigns in one place.”

Whether or not this system will work as well for Twitter as it does for Facebook remains to be seen — but we’ll keep our ear close to the ground in case any more details surface.