Twitter hires Facebook and Yelp veterans as first two ad salespeople

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on August 10, 2010 at 5:32 PM

In an attempt to ramp up its advertising model, Twitter has hired two employees to sell ads, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reported today for Wall Street Journal Blogs.

The microblogging site has hired Amanda Levy, the first ad saleswoman for review site Yelp, and Dan Coughlin, former director of media sales at Facebook. Levy will be Twitter's sales director in the Western region, while Coughlin will be sales director for the East. In an e-mailed statement, Twitter's chief operating officer, Dick Costolo stated that the company is "putting together a top-flight sales team as we begin to open our Promoted Suite of products to more companies," according to the WSJ.

Both Levy and Coughlin will report directly to Costolo, and will focus on building out the "Twitter Promoted Products" area of the company, which consists of Promoted Tweets and Trends, TechCrunch explained yesterday.

AdAge reported that although Twitter has only experimented with ads and promotions in the past, future plans call for increasing revenue in the fourth quarter while testing different types of ad units.

"The micro-blog service sees traditional ads -- or its version of traditional ads -- as one of four potential revenue streams for the company. The others include commerce, such as the promotions for Disney and JetBlue through its Earlybird Offers service; commercial accounts, which include access to data and analytics; and the data feed itself, which Twitter charges the likes of Google, Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo for," the AdAge article explained.

However, Levy just created her Twitter account one week ago, while Coughlin created his two months ago, but has posted just 15 times, Gawker pointed out. "...they've apparently been so busy actually working to make actual money for Yelp and Facebook that they didn't have time for unprofitable distractions like... tweeting."