When I first saw the latest Promoted Trending Topic this morning on Twitter I thought it was a bit odd: “Predators.” Given the times we live in, when I see that term now I tend to think of something more alarming than some kind of an animal or the like. But fear not, the topic is being promoted here simply to showcase the latest movie in the Predator series, called, yes, Predators. But there’s something else weird about this Promoted Trending Topic — it’s linking to Facebook.
As you can see when you click on the Promoted Topic, the top tweet is from the PredatorsMovie Twitter account. This promoted tweet reads, “They can hear you, smell you, and see you.#Predators in theaters Friday – http://bit.ly/amt8XE” — that bit.ly link takes you to a Facebook page where the trailer is located. So yes, Twitter is effectively promoting their rival Facebook thanks to this latest ad buy.
I’ve reached out to Facebook to make sure they’re cool with that. After all, Facebook wasn’t so kind to Twitter last month when Twitter tried to roll out a new friend connection feature with the massive social network — and it was promptly blocked. Both Twitter and Facebook said at the time that they were looking into the issue — but it still isn’t working.
As an interesting side note, you may notice now that “LeBron James” is currently the top Trending Topic on Twitter. That’s interesting because just this past weekend, the NBA paid to have his name be a Promoted Trending Topic. As I said at the time, that was likely a smart idea because of the massive amount of interesting (and undoubtedly Twitter searches) around James. The fact that his name has organically risen to the top proves that.
Update: Twitter takes the high road. “We’re totally fine with that (and btw, it’s not the first time and won’t be the last time),” a Twitter representative tells us.
Update 2: Interestingly enough, the promoted tweet has switched to one that instead links the actual Predators movie website.
“Advertisers can change the tweet and links as often as they’d like,” is what Twitter had to say on the matter.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1.1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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