Twitter took a big step forward last March with its self-service ad platform that was designed for personal branding and social media marketing. And a year later, after much feedback, Twitter is ending its invite-only service and opening ad-buying up to all U.S. users. This means that anybody can now sign up and buy promoted Tweets of their own, with all the same sorts of analytics and marketing tools provided that the big advertisers and campaigns get with their promoted tweets. This doesn’t mean that you’ll see more ads on the social media service per se, but you might start to see some more unexpected promoted tweets pop up as users begin to experiment with the ad-buying service for their own individual projects.
Tag: Social Networking
Path is Adding 1 Million Users Per Week
You’d be surprised (or maybe not) about how far reaching the data you put on the internet is. With more and more social media users becoming concerned about the far-reaching impact of what they post online, privacy-concerned services have been springing up to counter the progressively greater exposure provided by social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. One such service is Path, which has been around for some time, but has just recently reached a milestone statistic: after taking 3 years to collect 6 million users, the service is now adding 1 million new users per week. This major jump came thanks to an update that added private messaging, which proved popular in many areas of South and Central America. Now the service is making significant headway in major American markets. Only time will tell if the service’s hard limit of 150 “friends” per account will usher in a new, more personal age of social media, or if it will spell the doom of the service altogether by preventing scaling.
Twitter Brand Engagement Strategies
Data collected by social media startup Nestivity on Thursday demonstrated, on several levels, what it means to engage with an audience on Twitter. The top 25 brands, in terms of engagement, were selected based on the results of a study that examined how brands cultivate relationships with influencers, customers, and advocates on Twitter. It analyzed over 739,000 tweets over a months time, and looked at the top 100 most-followed brands on Twitter. According to Nestivity, many brands fall into the trap of using Twitter for push marketing, or broadcasting messages. But their view is that if a brand is using Twitter as a one-way marketing tool, they’re losing out on quality interactions with customers. Fitting with this trend, the most prolific of the 100 Brands tweeted every 6-20 minutes, however none of those most active accounts made the most engaged list. This indicates that quality tweets still matter more than their quantity – and quality oftentimes means something as simple as photographs and video. 76% of content that was shared had a photo attached, and 18% had a video as part of the message. The top 10 brands who followed these trends were, in order: Notebook of Love, Disneywords, ESPN, Playstation, Disney, Chelsea Football Club, BBC Breaking News, NASA, CNN Breaking News, and Instagram.
Comedy Central’s Social Media Comedy Festival
As television and social media become ever more intertwined, new uses of Twitter and Facebook for broadcast are frequently pioneered, but rarely as a primary distribution platform. Next week, Comedy Central will be hosting a five day comedy festival entirely on Twitter and Vine, completely removing its traditional broadcast element from the equation, and effectively testing an entirely new format for mainstream media distribution sanctioned by a company as large as Comedy Central’s owner, Viacom. Only one event for the festival (a panel discussion between Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Judd Apatow) will take place before a live audience, and it will be broadcast via Twitter exclusively. Events like Comedy Central’s social media comedy festival could be a valid solution to the question: how do we engage mass audiences in real time in an on-demand world?
Twitter And BBC Partner To Promote Branded Videos
BBC America tweeted Thursday night that it partnered with Twitter to launch the first “in-Tweet branded video” that occurs at the same time as a scripted television series. Twitter hasn’t shared additional details beyond the tweet, and BBC America has been mum as well. But previous partnerships between Twitter and other TV networks point to how this partnership might function. For instance, Twitter’s work with Turner Broadcasting to distribute video clips of instant replays from March Madness basketball games revolved around advertising in these videos, and Twitter’s promotion of these branded highlights. Turner expanded its reach, and Twitter generated much more revenue. As well, Twitter, ESPN, and Ford partnered during the College Football season, to similar ends. This BBC deal, though, represents a move into scripted television, and it seems likely that instead of replays, branded videos will feature Previews and perhaps recaps of shows recently aired.
Twitter Pulls Ribbon’s In-Stream Payments System
We reported earlier that payments startup Ribbon had launched their “in-stream” payments system for Twitter, allowing users to make purchases without leaving the Twitter environment by making use of the Twitter Cards feature launched recently. About an hour after the feature launched, Twitter shut it down, invalidating the feature. A workaround is currently in place, directing users to a ribbon.co checkout page instead, but this diminished functionality does not align with Ribbon’s goals. The startup is currently attempting to resolve this matter with Twitter.
Facebook Amps Up Targeting With Acxiom and Others
Thanks to recently announced partnerships between Facebook and data providers Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon, marketers now have a greater degree of control than ever before when targeting their advertisements. These companies have compiled audience segments ready to be layered on top of the Facebook information-based targeting already available. These segments give marketers the ability to target based on the sites someone visits outside of Facebook, loyalty program memberships, household size, and more than 500 other criteria. With a billion-plus audience, Facebook has been attractive to marketers looking for broad spectrum coverage, and with these new additions, extremely detailed targeting is now a reality.
Facebook Phone Launches…Sort Of
The Facebook Phone has arrived…sort of. Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Home, an Android-compatible integration that replaces the Android home screen with a Facebook-branded experience dedicated to providing easier personal communication than the current app model does. Apps are still easily accessible via an app launcher. Facebook’s clever move relieves them of the hassle of producing a hardware piece, while gaining them deeper hardware integration. The question remains: Will other companies create similar top-level integration packages for Android devices to promote their brands?
Twitter Launches New Ad Buying Tool
Twitter, the king of social TV, geared up recently to capitalize on the second-screen advertising field by introducing an ad API. Now, in conjunction with partner TBG Digital, Twitter has launched a tool that lets marketers bid on ads on Twitter in a similar manner to programming a DVR. Brands simply select television shows along a timeline, and specify demographics or trends they wish to target. This comes in the wake of Oreo’s ground-shaking #blackout tweet during the Super Bowl, which has caused quite a stir in the ensuing months over the future of real-time second-screen advertising via social networks.
Facebook To Advertise Based On Offline Habits
Starting today, Facebook will be able to target some of its advertising based on offline habits as a result of new partnerships announced today with Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon that will apply their records about purchase histories to Facebook’s Custom Audience’s product. Custom Audience allows advertisers identify Facebook users by their Facebook ID, phone number, or email, and now advertisers can match that information with data from these firms, gathered from customer loyalty programs. Businesses, Facebooks says, can now target categories like soda drinkers or auto intenders. However, as with any Facebook ad, the user can opt out at any chosen time.
