One of the things that didn't get much attention during Twitter's massive redesign of its webpage and official apps were the new Brand Pages. The feature allows companies on Twitter to customize their main pages to feature banner advertisements, "pinned" tweets at the top, and auto-expanding tweets. Twitter's stated goal is to get companies to cease linking people to their web addresses and start directing them to their branded Twitter pages — @suchandsuch being much easier to fit in a television commercial than the full "www" and "dot com," apparently.

It seems we will soon see more of these pages, as AdAge got a hold of emails that Twitter is sending out to potential advertisers letting them know the social network is expanding branded pages beginning on February first, but that only companies spending $25,000 and up can qualify. Right now, only a small handful of companies have the brand pages, and reportedly some have committed to spending upwards of $2 million in total advertising to secure them.

Twitter has long been experimenting with ways to bring in more revenue, a difficult proposition when you consider how simple the service is when compared to Facebook. Facebook, for its part, has no lack of advertising opportunities on its pages (and the occasional backlash that goes with them). By comparison, Twitter's Brand Pages seem relatively low impact, hopefully as the company moves forward with its ad plans they won't become more intrusive.