Ever since it hatched into the world in the summer of 2006, Twitter has been many different things to many different people.

For users it represented a chance to express themselves to the world, for brands it represented a chance to converse with consumers in real-time, and for business it represented an infuriating potential goldmine.

Surely nobody would create a new online social platform without serious consideration to monetising the content, but to the outside world that was exactly the case with Twitter. It wasn’t until April 2010 when Twitter unveiled Promoted Tweets, that the company appeared to experiment with monetised content.

That experiment appears to have been a success as this month (November), Twitter is rolling out what co-founder Biz Stone calls a “promoted suite” of products, which will include promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.

According to Stone, Twitter was mocked in its early days for its perceived lack of business model. “People were always teasing us for the first three years of Twitter,” says Stone, “because we insisted on building on what I call value before profit.”

Conversation with Biz, and his subsequent keynote speech at the Festival of Media LatAm, is peppered with these types of phrases, which would sound disingenuous from almost anyone else. Stone, and his co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, insisted on creating a “meaningful and relevant” global network first, he says. “Meaningful” is another recurring word in Stone’s vocabulary.

Although Stone claims the promoted tweet experiment has performed “better than expected”, he admits that reactions were mixed at the time. “When we finally started experimenting with promoted tweets, trends and accounts, people acted as though we had been looking around under the couch cushions for a business plan for the last three years.” He insists that there was always a plan for a “non-traditional” business model that didn’t annoy users.

With the number of daily tweets fast approaching the 100 million mark, it comes as no surprise that brands have been keen to get in on the twitter action. Stone is modest, almost self-effacing about the easy sell: “We were very fortunate that people were lining up to spend money with us.”

While the industry as a whole is struggling with how to define and measure engagement, Twitter has its own approach. “There’s about 16 things users can do with a tweet,” explains Stone. “They can click on a link, favourite, re-tweet, click on an image, they can block the user if they hate the tweet. They can do all these things which are signals to us first of all that they’re engaging with the tweets.”

The latest word to add to your social media lexicon is “resonance”. This is the value that Twitter applies to the success or otherwise of a promoted tweet, and through this it creates a quality control aspect to the ad sale.

Since resonance is defined by user activity, this effectively leads to a crowd-sourced ad planning department and a “success of return” model for advertisers. Stone adds: “So if a tweet is resonating lower than that account’s tweets normally resonate, we take it out of rotation. We don’t charge the advertiser for it anymore, because the advertiser doesn’t want a bad tweet seen by users and users don’t want to see a bad tweet.”

This new business phase of Twitter was signalled by the recent promotion of Dick Costelo from chief operating office to chief executive. Costelo has been known to the Twitter team for 13 years and has a strong pedigree when it comes to successful start-ups. Upon the suggestion that this means that Twitter now means business, Stone agrees: “I guess you say that. Dick is very focussed on turning this into a business. We’ve always said the first goal was always to turn Twitter to be a meaningful, ubiquitous, relevant information network.

“We still have a lot of growing to do around the world but it is big enough now that we can have someone focussing on generating revenues. We didn’t just want to create a product that has a positive global impact, we also wanted to make a business out of it and we wanted to have fun doing it.”

This might sound like a company that wants to have its cake and eat it. Stone admits that Twitter is an anomaly amongst other online advertising providers when it comes to engagement levels. Despite the involvement of big names like Sony and Coca-Cola, the fledgling advertising model still represents a learning curve for the platform... 

Read the rest of this interview here.