Twitter is gifting its Promoted Tweets advertisers with wider distribution across the network, meaning you will start to see Promoted Tweets from brands you don’t follow starting Tuesday.
Brands and advertisers can indicate that they would like to reach Twitter users similar to their current followers. Similarities are determined through Twitter’s interest graph — a collection of data points that take into consideration who the user follows, how the user interacts with tweets, what the user retweets, and so forth.
Twitter users will not be able to opt-out of the unsolicited advertisements from brands they don’t follow. Instead, they will be able to click to “Dismiss” them from their timelines (as shown in the screenshot below).
As with all Promoted Tweets, the tweets will appear in the user’s timeline once, at or near the top of the timeline. The Promoted Tweet will then scroll through the timeline, just as other tweets do.
Twitter put Promoted Tweets in users’ timelines earlier this summer, but initially promised to only show ads to a brand’s current following. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed the change in policy during a press event at the company’s headquarters last week.