Twitter unveiled a new program in April. The program, Promoted Tweets, has been in beta testing. Just a handful of advertisers have been participating, including such well-known companies as Starbucks, Sony Pictures, Best Buy, and Red Bull.

Advertisers are allowed to push the tweets they make to the top of the search results and they pay by a CPM basis. Twitter will remove any tweets that have been promoted but are not receiving much interaction from Twitter users. They do this because if there isn’t a lot of interaction, then the tweets are considered not to be helpful. The interaction that users can do with Promoted Tweets includes retweets, clicked links, or replies.

A discount online brokerage company called Zecco has given a great demonstration of just how powerful the Promoted Tweets program can be. Zecco Pulse is the blog run by Zecco and there was a lot of content based on the oil spill in the Gulf, British Petroleum (BP,) and how energy stocks and other such investments would be impacted as well as the impact it all would have on the macro economy.

The keywords involved are popular ones with users and Zecco saw Promoted Tweets really help the exposure the company received. Zecco measured how effective 50 promoted tweets were against the regular tweets it puts out and found that, on average, there was a 50 percent increase in how many Twitter users clicked, retweeted, or replied to the promoted tweets. In fact, there were some tweets that saw increases of as much as 200 and 300 percent.

This is great news for companies who, like Zecco, do not have huge amounts of money for marketing. It allows smaller businesses to compete with competitors who are better financed and allows for more effective targeting of advertising. It’s a brand new way of growing your online business without spending more than you can afford.