PEP PepsiCo Inc

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles 

It's no secret that social networks use you to sell ads, but now Twitter Inc. wants you to go make the ads and share them yourself. On Tuesday, Twitter announced promoted stickers with its first sticker partner, PepsiCo Inc.

"Photos with a brand's stickers are shared with all of a user's followers, allowing brands to be featured by their fans in a truly authentic way," Twitter said in a statement. Pepsi has designed nearly 50 different stickers for the promotion, but Twitter users will only see eight Pepsi stickers specific to one of 10 different countries, including the U.S., India, Russia, Canada and Mexico.

If you're in a country where Pepsi stickers are available, the next time you add a sticker to a photo you want to tweet, the first stickers you'll see will be from Pepsi. In the U.S., the options include two Pepsi cans side by side, a couple of smiley-faced emojis, a barbecue grill and a ballet dancer's feet tiptoeing in red dance shoes. Pepsi also paid for a promoted hashtag, #SayItWithPepsi, as a part of the promoted sticker deal.

Besides nabbing the top sticker spot in Twitter's photo-editing tools, promoted stickers work exactly the same as non-branded stickers. They can only be applied to photos, and only with Twitter's Android and iOS apps. All stickers can be viewed across mobile apps and the web.

Both regular and promoted stickers act as visual hashtags, which means anyone viewing your photo on Twitter can tap or click the sticker to see other images that use it.

Twitter's decision to sell stickers as an advertising product to brands is a common tactic to monetize what people share via social media. On Snapchat Inc., brands can buy video filters, and on Facebook Inc.'s popular Facebook Messenger app, brands can pay to have sticker packs show up for users as well.

Twitter and Pepsi declined to say how much the drink maker paid for the promoted sticker campaign, or when it would end. But the companies did say in a statement that the deal was the "largest partnership between the two brands to date."

Promoted stickers are Twitter's latest attempt to create new revenue streams for the company, which is fighting dwindling revenue and stagnant user growth. Twitter has recently signed deals that will let it live stream National Basketball Association programming and the National Football League's Thursday night games.

Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 16, 2016 16:42 ET (20:42 GMT)

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