• ReadWriteWeb, Wednesday, December 15, 2010 12:03 PM

Twitter is now offering potential advertisers a form to express their interest in buying Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends. "This may be the real time web, but real-time advertisers, apparently, are still best advised to pick up the phone with credit card in hand," ReadWriteWeb jokes. Interested advertisers are being asked to select from five categories of monthly ad budgets, from below $10,000 through over $100,000, as well as choose whether they'd like their campaigns to begin in 1 to 4 weeks, 1 to 3 months or 3 months from now.

However, such a turn-key ad buying solution is worrisome to some industry watchers. "Selling trending topics is like gaming Digg," social media marketing consultant Jason Falls tells ReadWriteWeb. "Twitter is inviting marketing money bags to completely ruin the organic nature of the tool. When I look at something like that, I tell clients, 'They're just whores for your money.' It's obvious they're making Facebook-like errors to try and compensate for the fact they never had a business model in mind when they built this thing."

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