The effects of advertising in Twitter on the regular 20-30 year old users : Advertising in a social networking medium

The purpose of this thesis work was to investigate and analyze in what way online adver-tising in Twitter affects its regular users nowadays. More specifically it focused on the young (20-30 years old) frequent Internet users of the social networking medium. The theoretical part of the study introduced Twitter and methods of advertising in it. The em-pirical part of the thesis was conducted by using a quantitative research method. The data was gathered from discussions of a focus and a control group interviews. The interview questions contained subtopics for free debate in order to obtain more information. The aim of the research was to find out how much the young Twitter visitors used the site, how much they were aware of the online advertising and how their daily encounter with ads affected their user behavior. The research results revealed what impression advertising had on Twitter users, and how advertising influences their user habits. The research supports the statement that despite the negative impact of advertising in Twitter on its users, the site’s attractiveness to its clientele does not suffer from the advertisements.