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Turbotax Uses Twitter Feed on Google AdSense Ads

Though not the first to do it, Intuit’s tax software company TurboTax is using Twitter to help answer questions people may have about their taxes and the Turbotax software. But there is another interesting twist.

Some of TurboTax’s Google AdSense ads are actually displaying the most recent Tweets that have been registered on the TurboTax Twitter account, and the ad clicks through to the account rather than their flagship website. Here’s an example of what it looks like:



TurboTax is doing this in hopes that users will add TurboTax to their Twitter account and build up a “conversational vehicle,” as Intuit marketing director Seth Greenberg puts it. “We’re measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we’re a resource? We’re not going to hard sell you on the product, but we want people to know there are lots of people here who can help answer your questions,” said Greenberg in an interview with Abbey Klaassen of AdAge.

Intuit is targeting the ads toward other social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo.

Skittles had an experiment where they streamed their Twitter feed on the homepage of the company, but quickly abandoned it after goons posted nasty things on the feed. I’m not sure what filters Google has for the ads, but Intuit certainly would not want to display ads featuring nastiness.

It will be interesting to see how this develops over time. Having a Twitter account so users can see what a brand is having for lunch doesn’t too much good, but leveraging user generated content to provide real grassroots marketing is something of big value. We’ll see what kind of success Intuit has.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 8:32 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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