It wasn’t so long ago that we all welcomed the news around Promoted Tweets, and now after a lot of waiting, it seems that we might be getting another bit of news on the Twitter brand platform. According to a few sources, Twitter is considering selling trending topics as ad space. Apparently, Twitter is even having preliminary conversations with existing partners about this potentially new ad stream for them.

According to the Mashable post on it,  “Promoted trends” would let advertising partners create and sponsor a trending term to appear alongside organic terms for a set period of time. Should a user then click on the Promoted trend, they would be redirected to the Twitter search page with the same advertiser’s Promoted Tweet featured at the top.

There’s a couple of interesting points to consider here if this is in fact going to launch and it will function as detailed above. The first is the eyeballs the trending topics actually get – I for one use TweetDeck and don’t actually look at the trending topics that much and tend to rely on watching what’s happening in my own circle. Second is the fact that for a topic to trend, it must generate a lot of mentions – having a “promoted trend” surely doesn’t make sense as it isn’t a “trend” but an ad unit that looks like a trend. Third, the mechanic above drives further traffic to the search page – Twitter is probably one of the only networks where the majority of links drive you to other pages, in this case and the case of the promoted Tweets, they are both focusing on the Twitter Search page.

It’s going to be very interesting watching the Twitter brand platform develop. I for one welcome any move to make the network more brand friendly, but you can’t help but ask the question – why are you focusing on the Twitter search page and not applications, specifically mobile-based applications where many see the big money moving forward?