Twitter will soon be tweeting Promoted Tweets, which will appear at the top of your Twitter search page. The company, which has been searching for a viable business model for months, today announced the new advertising platform on its official blog.

Essentially, a Promoted Tweet is just that; a tweet that one of the company’s advertising partners would like to promote and highlight to a wider group of users. Twitter users will begin to see tweets that are promoted by Twitter’s partners at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages.

Twitter is launching the first phase of its Promoted Tweets platform in conjunction with advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America.

“We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote. “We’ll attempt to measure whether the tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand.”

Promoted Tweets will retain all functionality of a regular tweet, and only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on a search results page.

“Over the years, we’ve resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimize for value before profit,” Stone wrote. “Stubborn insistence on a slow and thoughtful approach to monetization — one which puts users first, amplifies existing value and generates profit — has frustrated some Twitter watchers. It’s non-traditional, it’s easy, and it makes a ton of sense for Twitter.”

Twitter said it plans to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and that it plans to expand beyond showing Promoted Tweets just in Twitter Search by including relevant Promoted Tweets in a user’s timeline. Twitter, however, will not do this until it evaluates the user experience and advertiser value of phase 1.

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