Twitter Trials Video Advertising Platform to Rival Facebook

Twitter is introducing video advertising. In a bid to broaden its revenue stream, the social media giant is looking to insert video ads due to the popularity of tweets that have clips embedded. In a blog post by Twitter, the company announced that a trial service will allow marketers to pay each time someone clicks to watch a video on the site. The microblogging site added video players within tweets earlier this year.

Twitter currently has 271 million users and CEO Dick Costolo is always seeking new ways to harness their engagement in a profitable manner. The new feature follows similar moves by rival Facebook, the world’s largest social network, to capture a bigger slice of the digital-video ad market, which is projected to expand 42 percent to $5.96 billion in the U.S., according to researcher EMarketer.

Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, said the following to Bloomberg Businessweek: “Video is a big deal for Twitter. Video was the biggest thing missing from their product. Facebook is very far ahead with video.”

Facebook currently leads the pack when it comes to social video adverts and has recently purchased LiveRail to help distribute video ads across the web.

In addition to advertising, Twitter is encouraging certain brands and high-profile users to start posting more videos, whether they’re promotional or not. “The overall goal is to bring more video into our users’ timelines to create a richer and more engaging Twitter,” the company said in its post.