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Twitter has said it will rollout it’s Twitter101 service and allow advertising on its site for the first time.

The social networking site said advertisers would be able to buy “Promoted Tweets” that will appear on Twitter’s search results pages.

It has been reluctant to allow advertising in the past.

However, co-founder Biz Stone said they would not be traditional adverts. They must be Tweets that “resonate with users” and be part of conversations.

Twitter is growing fast. Currently, the world’s Twitter users tweet about 50 million times a day 600 times a second.

Twitter’s management hopes to apply the Google advertising model to its own micro-blogging service.

Companies using the service, however, will be looking closely at the return on investment that the service will generate. Should they pay per tweet read, per click-through, or per sale-after-click?

Commercial tweets to build brands and create buzz are probably the most promising application of Twitter ads. For ad copy writers, it will present a new challenge: how to hook customers with 140 characters or less.

Twitter has already signed up a raft of big name organisations such as Sony Pictures, coffee chain Starbucks and US retailer Best Buy.

It describes the Promoted Tweets as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to a wider group of users”.

Initially, Promoted Tweets would only appear in Twitter search results, the company said, and only one Tweet would show up on each search results page.

It is the first toe in the advertising water for the social networking site, which has yet to make a profit and has only just begun to do deals to raise revenue from the high profile service.

It is an approach that the company described as a “stubborn insistence on a slow and thoughtful approach to monetisation”.

It follows Twitter’s announcement over the weekend that it will buy Atebits, the developer behind iPhone application “Tweetie”, which is one of the main user access points to Twitter.

The acquisition means that Twitter will for the first time be able to control directly the service they deliver to iPhone users, instead of relying on third party application developers to do this for them.

However, analysts say it also means that Twitter is turning the remaining applications developers that it has partnered in the past into direct competitors.

This raises the possibility that if Promoted Tweets prove unpopular with users, rival application developers may offer products that filter them out.

The advertising and Tweetie moves are not the first revenue-raising initiatives by Twitter – in October the company announced tie-ups with Google and Microsoft’s Bing under which the two search engines pay Twitter to include Tweets in their search results.

Twitter’s latest initiative is the first phase of its advertising plans. In future, Promoted Tweets will appear in users’ stream of posts, not just on Twitter search results pages.

Keen not to alienate his members, Biz Stone said that if users did not interact with Promoted Tweets by replying to them, “favoriting” them or retweeting them, they would “disappear”.