Mike Isaac

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Twitter Promoted-Account Ads for Mobile Go Mainstream

Here comes another reason for Twitter to boast about its potential for mobile ad dollars.

The microblogging company announced on Monday that it would expand its promoted-accounts advertising product to users’ main timeline on mobile devices all over the world.

Promoted accounts act pretty much like promoted tweets, but they’re more for garnering a larger following for the advertiser. There’s a little “follow” button inside the tweet itself, which ostensibly makes it much easier for people to follow the account right away.

If you haven’t heard of promoted accounts, you’re probably not alone. They aren’t nearly as popular as Twitter’s promoted tweet ad products — far and away the company’s biggest revenue driver — and they’re currently relegated to either the left-hand side of the page on the Web, or buried way, way down in the Discover stream on Twitter for mobile devices. Though Twitter positions Monday’s change as a “beta version,” this will give the ad unit far more visibility than it has ever seen before.

The move is simple enough: It’s a way for Twitter to boost another unit for advertisers who want to get in on Twitter’s mobile ads. And expanding those types of mobile units is certainly important for the newly public Twitter, which has 76 percent of its audience visiting the site via mobile devices.

I’m told that the ad load will stay the same, however, so you won’t be seeing a whole bunch more advertising in your Timeline from here on out.

I expect you’ll start seeing the units in your main mobile timeline pretty soon.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus