Twitter has been pushing their ad platform on brands for some time, but the option to tap into this side of the micro-blogging network hasn’t been an option for your common or garden user… until now.

The company has started to roll out “Advertise On Twitter” pop-ups to select profiles when they visit Twitter.com, encouraging users to “grow your followers and help them spread the word about you”.

Barry Schwartz of Marketing Land captured the pop-up, which looks like this:

The link takes you to ads.twitter.com, which is still off-limits for folks who aren’t privy to the ‘start now’ message above.

Twitter has confirmed that they’ve been rolling out this message for a couple of weeks, and that they are “testing various ways to roll out this offering and reach potentially interested advertisers”. No word yet on how well this works for regular users, how good the quality of followers are from these ads or whether this is even going to be an option for people who don’t already boast large followings (and/or engagement), but Twitter ads could be coming to a screen near you, and soon.

But are they wanted? Certainly new users often struggle to generate a large audience on Twitter, but (essentially) buying followers is a bit like buying Likes on Facebook – it’s an effective marketing technique for brands, but it seems a little desperate for a person.

I’m curious about the benefits and payoff for users. So, if you’ve already tested the ads on your personal account, please hit the comments to let us know how it worked out.

(Source: Marketing Land.)