Sometime in the past few hours, Twitter made a subtle, but not insignificant change: their Promoted Trends are now appearing at the top of the Trends area on Twitter.com. Previously, these were at the bottom of the area, buried under the inevitable topics about Justin Bieber.
Obviously, anything at the top of a list is going to be more visible than something at the bottom of the list — and Twitter appears to be testing out what that will mean for click-through rates of these Promoted Trends. When you click on one, it still takes you to search results for the term with a Promoted Tweet paid for by the advertising company at the top of the feed. Promoted Trends still have the highly visible “Promoted” logo as well.
“We’ve always said that we would experiment with all elements of our Promoted Products suite. Moving the Promoted Trend to the top spot is one example of this experimentation, and you can expect to see more changes in this space,” a Twitter representative tells us.
On old Twitter, this may move the Promoted Trend above the fold for many users. But with New Twitter, Trends have been moved higher — which will make this top Promoted Trend even more visible and clickable. What that will mean in terms of revenue flowing in, only Twitter knows.
Now that their @earlybird monetization experiment is over, Twitter has said it will focus more on its Promoted suite of products. That includes Trends, Tweets, and soon, Promoted Accounts as well.
