Twitter announces its initial test of ad fleets

In November, Twitter has launched the fleets feature globally. The company recently announced its new test of ads within Fleets, its take on the stories format, which will see ads inserted between Fleets as users tap through the full-screen frames.

Fleets ads much looks like Instagram Stories promotions, which appears between the Fleets from the people you follow on the platform, and which is designated as 'Promoted' tag beneath the profile info. With the prominent placement of Fleets helping to prompt further attention of the users it tends to be beneficial for Twitter advertisers as it is also for the first time providing full-screen, vertical format ads within the app.

Twitter in a blogpost explained :

"As we experiment on this new surface for ads, we’ll take a close look at how vertical, full-screen ads perform on Twitter. We want to understand how this content performs for customers not just for Fleet ads, but for future iterations of full-screen formats on Twitter. We also believe that ads should be non-intrusive and bring value to people, so we’re focused on learning more about how people feel about and engage with this new placement."

If Twitter end up expanding their tweet ads to full screen format, it will be far more interesting than Fleets ads in isolation. 

Recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded to an investor question about the performance of Fleets, explaining that:

"We're seeing some new activity and new demographics utilizing Fleets. [We launched Fleets] to solve the problem of people not wanting to Tweet because they feared it staying around too long. And for that use case, it is working very well. And then it certainly has taken on -- it certainly has seen a different audience than we normally see. But we still have much to learn and a lot to figure out in terms of like where it goes from here."

This explains that the company launched this fleet option for users to share content without any fear and has worked very well. 

Fleets ads will support images and video in 9:16, while video ads can be up to 30 seconds longand brands will also be able to add a “swipe-up” option for the same.

If users/advertisers are already experimenting with similar full-screen format promotions on Instagram or TikTok, this can be a good chance from them to test the fleet ads feature for their promotion. Though it doesn't seems promising at this stage for all the users.

As noted by the tech-company, it will launch the initial test of Fleets ads with selected partners in the US from today, on both iOS and Android, with more regions to follow soon.