In a previous blog post we told you about Twitter’s promoted tweets and how participant companies would need to truly engage their followers in order to get a positive ROI. For some companies, the promoted tweets have been hugely successful. Coca-Cola reported a 6 percent engagement rate and companies are now spending upwards of $100,000 to advertise via Promoted Tweets.

Now Twitter has launched its latest advertising product: Promoted Accounts. Per Twitter, Promoted Accounts will be suggested to Twitter users based on the list of people and organizations they currently follow. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm will look at that account’s followers and who they follow. Twitter will then target Twitter users who follow similar accounts but who do not yet follow that advertiser’s Twitter account. Twitter explains,“… for example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox. If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.”

So will advertisers be excited about Promoted Accounts? Most likely yes. As of right now, Twitter is working with more than 40 advertisers and 80 percent of them have become repeat buyers. However, considering the cost of Promoted Tweets, using Promoted ad products might not be feasible for smaller businesses, especially since Twitter does not currently offer geographically focused ads.  Mashable.com pointed out that in order for these ad platforms to be useful to small businesses, the advertising platforms need to be targeted based on location.

So how could a company use Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts? These Promoted advertising products would be perfect to use during a contest or sweepstakes to help encourage customer engagement and to get people excited about entering. The ads could also be used around the announcement or debut of a new product or service – like Virgin Mobile did when they used Promoted Tweets to announce flights to a new city. And finally, companies could use the Promoted products around large events – like Coca-Cola did with the World Cup, to get followers excited about and involved with the event. While most companies might be wary of purchasing Promoted products, we should keep a close eye the success of these products as they allow not just for brand awareness, but for customer involvement and word-of-mouth buzz when Twitter users share the information with their followers. And if that’s not exciting enough, The Wall Street Journal noted that “…on average 5% of Twitter users who saw a Promoted Tweet interacted with it, a rate that is ‘an order of magnitude greater’ than most online ad campaigns!”