Twitter is expanding its promoted-tweets program and is now including paid tweets from companies that people don't already follow in their timelines.
The tweets, which began rolling out today, include promotions for AMC Theatres, American Express, Best Western, Disney, HP, Lexus, Lionsgate, Movietickets.com, Pepsi, Red Bull, Salesforce.com, Sephora, Xbox, and Yahoo.
Twitter started inserting paid tweets into people's streams in July. The difference with that initial rollout was that people would only see paid tweets from companies they were following. Now they'll see tweets from whichever company is running a paid program.
Not everyone will necessarily see them right away. Twitter says it is rolling out the program slowly and is beginning with a small (single-digit) percentage of users. It also says it is targeting paid tweets at people it thinks will be most interested in them.
"A promoted tweet will appear in a user's timeline only if the tweet is likely to be interesting and relevant to that user," according to Twitter's blog. "Our platform uses a variety of signals to determine which promoted tweets are relevant to users, including what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a tweet, what they retweet, and more."
Based on early usage and user response, Twitter says it will roll these targeted, promoted tweets out to a larger audience in the coming months.