USA:Twitter Inc aired its first TV ads

Twitter Inc aired its first TV ads to tout its advertising potential on Sunday during a Nascar broadcast on Time Warner Inc's TNT cable network.

The ads, produced as part of a partnership between Twitter and Nascar, come as the six-year old micro-blogging service seeks to establish itself as a serious social media business, despite heightened doubts about the sector in the wake of Facebook Inc's bumpy IPO.

Twitter is hoping to attract major brands to its service by cultivating the widespread use of hashtags - the keywords in a tweet preceded by the symbol (#) that denote a tweet's topic - and promoting hashtag pages as destinations where consumers can find information or supplemental content about products.

Using Nascar to demonstrate how hashtag pages could work, Twitter aired six different 15-second spots during Sunday's Pocono 400 race that introduced the "#NASCAR" hashtag and directed viewers to the URL "twitter.com/#NASCAR." On the Nascar's hashtag page, Nascar fans could view content posted by drivers, their families and racing teams that supplemented the cable broadcast.