Twitter To Launch Promoted Accounts

If you’re looking to grow your Twitter following, it might help to have your name and avatar show up when Twitter shows logged in users “Who to follow” on Twitter.com. And sometime soon, you’ll be able to pay for that exposure. It’s the latest offering in Twitter’s ongoing efforts to help users find new accounts to follow and find new followers.

Speaking Tuesday at the IAB Mixx conference, Twitter COO Dick Costolo said the company will launch an advertising service called “Promoted Accounts.” According to the WSJ’s recap of Costolo’s comments, Promoted Accounts will “allow advertisers to pay to boost their audience on Twitter by having Twitter automatically suggest to users that they ‘follow’ the advertisers’ accounts. To do that, a Twitter algorithm would find and suggest the accounts to Twitter users who might find them interesting.”

All Things Digital actually broke the news on Monday night, and reported that Promoted Accounts would be available to both companies and individual Twitter users.

None of the coverage of Costolo’s comments mentions what the pricing will be, nor when Promoted Accounts will roll out.

On a related note, Costolo also told the conference that Twitter will be shutting down its @earlybird deals account.