As part of their commercial plan Twitter have introduced Promoted Trending Topics.

Currently in its testing stages the Promoted Trending Topics appear alongside the non promoted topics, however, it will be clearly marked as promoted avoiding any misunderstanding.

As my handy image (please excuse the grey and pink colours) the first ever Promoted Trending Topic has been bought by Disney Pixar and is for Toy Story 3, as with all trending topics by clicking the promoted topic produces a feed of all related tweets.

Many Twitter fans and marketers have expressed concern that although the yellow box clearly communicates that the Tweet is promoted by Disney Pixar there could still be a certain level deception going on particularly when the promoted trending topics are able to move up and down the list in the same manner that other popular trends do. How Twitter judge where a promoted trending topic sits, however, is not so clear; is it based on how much the brand pays? Level of engagement?

Trending Topics offer Twitter users the chance to filter the thousands of Tweets transmitted every day, mixing in a sponsored trending topic somewhat muddies this function. It will be interesting to see how successful these Promoted Trending Topics will be…