Twitter At Eight

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TWITTER March 2014

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•  240+ million monthly active users

•  500 million tweets are sent per day

•  76% Twitter users are on mobile

•  77% accounts are outside of the US

•  Supports 35+ languages

Twitter now


However, the quarterly report raised some alarm bells… 1.  Although the total number of users

are UP, growth is at a slowing rate

2.  People are using it less: the number of timeline refreshes are DOWN

-7% +3.8%


This is a massive problem

The stock dropped by…

30% the day after the quarterly results announcement

Without an engaged, growing userbase, there’s a worry if Twitter will ever reach the mainstream status that Facebook has managed to, and can ever

show a significant enough profit for it’s crazy massive valuation…

$31 billion the day after IPO

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So why are refreshes going down?

There are a few explanations:

1.  Interface changes 2.  Confusion for new users 3.  Barriers for spectators


Changes to the interface have irked existing users

Flat interface – dingbat symbols

Surfacing conversations – “blue lines”

Surfacing recommendations


The infamous “blue lines” “To date…exchanges haven’t always been easy to follow. With this in mind, we’ve now made it easier for you to see conversations as they’re taking place”

Designed to make it easier for users to follow Twitter conversations by listing them next to one another in chronological order in users’ timelines.

Actually, a lot of people have found them confusing, confusing the reverse chronology & repeating some conversations over & over.


Platform is still pretty confusing for new users

Lots of Twitter lingo that people find confusing “We will continue to make the product easier to use” - Costolo


The platform doesn’t cater for both modes of Twitter usage

•  Tweeting couldn’t be more straight-forward, accessible from anywhere

•  Immediate gratification

BROADCAST CONSUMPTION

•  Managing your timeline is pretty difficult

•  You miss interesting items •  You people who you follow don’t

follow the people you follow, so conversations are less interesting

•  The median person has just 1 follower, active user just 62 followers


Your relationships on Twitter are looser than other networks

Twitter is a necessity for journalists, public figures, activists, entrepreneurs and businesses, but not so much for the average Internet user. Unlike on Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter connections aren’t always friends. Weak ties can discourage users who have few followers from tweeting and overwhelm them with a flood of ephemera. "I feel like there is a lot of noise on Twitter," says Jaime Richter in the New York Times. He’s a 34-year-old video editor who has had a Twitter account for a few years. "I just don't personally need to take in all that in my day.”

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So the challenge for Twitter: how do you make the platform more accessible without alienating current audience? “By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background we can increase high-quality interactions and make it more likely new or casual users will find this service as indispensable as our existing core users do.”


Highlighting photos

Moving away from the vertical chronological tweets timeline


New platform developments to make it easy for more devices to use Twitter across the world

Aiding expansion through halving the app-size for entry level Android phones


Recommendation pushes Alongside dedicated accounts that explain better how the service works, Twitter has introduced several accounts which automatically notify users about people to follow or breaking news.

@ magicrecs @eventparrot


Recommendation pushes Twitter have begun to push out recommendation notifications, alerting users if a number of accounts in their network begin to follow someone new or retweet or favourite the same tweet. Also Twitter will also begin to serve up notifications when people you follow start chatting about a particular topic, like a television show or sporting event.


Is there a role from brands in helping people navigate their way through Twitter?

AJAX NETFLIX

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Expanding the platform in 2014

and beyond…

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1.  Research 2.  Social commerce 3.  In-twitter dwell


Aside from ad products, research is becoming much more important for Twitter

9% Twitter’s business is marketing & analytics, but they are looking at ways to monetise it…and how it can be used to bolster the case for paid Twitter advertising. They are also opening up their archives more broadly to academics for studies such as those linking election results to Twitter chatter, or financial results to stock market performance.


CNN Partnership – predicting breaking stories and trends

News outlet CNN announced that it had partnered with analytics firm Dataminr & Twitter to develop a tool that alerts journalists to breaking stories and trends. The program searches for patterns based on language and locations, which are then put through an algorithm to select important events.

CNN said that the program had helped alert its reporters to various stories including explosions in Al Mansour, Iraq and that Justin Bieber had been arrested.


Emergency alerts

A new Twitter feature allows emergency services to deliver real-time warnings to smartphones during emergencies. During disasters, organisations will be able to mark chosen tweets as alerts, giving them an orange bell to draw attention within a user’s Twitter feed. Users can also sign up to receive the tweets as push notifications. The Rural Fire Service’s website crashed due to massive traffic during the recent bushfires in NSW. They directed the public to Twitter for up-to-date information and warnings, their messages having been retweeted more than 18,000 times.


300 hoping to find the “next big thing” in music

“We’re in the business of discovering artists…The partnership is to create tools for the creative community that allows more artists to be discovered and more successful.” (300 music) Twitter are opening up its public & private data (including information not publicly available, such as location tags) to 300 entertainment, a start up that plans to analyze information to pinpoint emerging artists and help record labels, brands and musicians understand it.


Nielsen are beginning to measure TV ratings through Twitter

Although this is currently a crude process (most rating numbers don’t match with traditional rating systems), this is seen as the beginning of a study into the relationship between the two.

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Twitter are stepping up social commerce capabilities

Building on some single application successes with Amex back in 2012


Brands have used Twitter commerce as an exchange for social advocacy

DAISY TWEET SHOP PAY WITH A TWEET


But Twitter is beginning to build a more centralised commerce platform

Twitter are currently advertising for a commerce product manager, a commerce product marketing manager, and a senior manager for commerce partnerships. Frequent mentions of a “marketplace” will work on bringing in different third parties to a single platform to sell consumers their goods and services. The ads also seem to imply a link between the Twitter advertising & goods that will be sold on Twitter. Although there were rumours that a “tweet to send money to others” product was built, as well as other versions of “tweet to buy,” they never saw the light of day.

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There’s a push to increase in-Twitter dwell time through more rich media ad products

In particular, during prime time TV shows. Twitter’s new ad targeting system scans a show for specific ads, then displays another ad from the same marketer to people posting about the show – advanced key word advertising.


AMPLIFY: Video clips Partners with TV channels to pump promoted tweets & short video clips (co-branded with advertiser & network) into feeds where users are likely to be tuned into the channel.

Objectives are twofold: 1.  Promote broadcasters programmes 2.  Reach TV audiences as they discuss the shows on

their social networks

Instant replay of college football on Twitter, promoted by both ESPN & Ford. The posts were promoted to people who are not following Ford or ESPN but who may be interested in the clips based on the people they follow, and what they post to Twitter about.

#didyouseethat


AMPLIFY Examples: NBA & MTV


SEE IT: TV subscriptions through Twitter A new partnership with Comcast lets subscribers view TV shows and movies via tweets.

"Millions of users are exposed to the live conversation that unfolds on Twitter while a show is on the air and now, with See It, they’ll be able to tune in directly from a Tweet.” – Costolo

Comcast is focused on the Twitter partnership for now, but there are currently talks to roll out the See It button on other entertainment websites like IMDB and Flixster.

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Thanks J

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