After testing out several different design options over the past few months (to the chagrin of many users), Twitter has finally debuted the redesign that is going to stick. It’s a Facebook-like design, with a profile picture and a full background picture that takes up the full screen. The big news, though, comes with the tweets themselves: content that’s popular – that is, retweeted or shared many times – will appear in larger font, drawing attention to material that’s spreading rapidly or that has proven successful on these metrics. As well, twitter accounts can post a stickied tweet to the top of their timeline, promoting a specific campaign or drawing attention to something more about themselves, serving as additional promo for the account. It should allow social media managers and marketers more options in tweaking accounts to push the content that they want to the front of their feeds – and, ideally, their followers.
Tag: twitter
Twitter Making Push For Social TV
Twitter is looking to expand its social TV efforts outside of the continental US with moves to acquire Mesagraph and SecondSync, from France and the UK respectively. Both of the startups track social TV analytics, and specialize in doing so in their respective countries. The startups both made clear that their teams will be helping with advertisers and broadcasters’ attempts to market to conversations around TV content on the social network. While Twitter has been big on the acquisitions front, the company itself announced plans to expand its own internal TV measurement tools to help brands domestically capture these metrics and conversation. To do this, Twitter has been working with Kantar, a marketing research form. For brands and advertisers, expect Twitter to make a bigger push into real-time marketing and analytics metrics to help community managers drive content in the right ways.
Twitter & Billboard Create Real-Time Music Chart
Twitter Music failed; it’s something we all watched happen from afar. Even big sponsorships couldn’t save the attempt at monitoring music on the social network – but now Twitter is trying again, with the premier music partner, Billboard. It wants to do to music what Nielsen does to rank TV shows with a real-time chart – slated to appear in Billboard.com – that keeps track of who is talking about what music, and when on the social network. The stated goal is to create a new industry standard for tracking the conversation about music on a platform on which music is heavily discussed. Twitter wants brands, artists, and managers to understand how people are talking about their product, and when; even though they failed with the initial attempt, Twitter’s new partnership could be promising moving forward with the company already known for its ability to track music as it moves throughout the world. With over 40 million tweets per day about music, the content is there to be tracked – it’s just a matter of Twitter getting it right.
Instagram Has More U.S. Mobile Users Than Twitter
According to a new E-Marketer report, Instagram now has more American based smartphone users than Twitter. Here are the specifics: Instagram has 35 million US mobile users, while Twitter has only 30.8 million. But for all users – which includes desktop users – Twitter still claims 40 million more users than Instagram, with 240 million total active users worldwide each month as compared to Instagram’s 200 million. The news comes on the heels of Twitter’s attempts to increase mobile engagement with multiple photo uploads and image tagging to, at least by the looks of it, compete with Instagram. Clearly both are viable platforms based on the numbers, but for the moment Instagram is creeping out in front, from a mobile point of view.
Twitter E-Commerce Platform Leaks
Twitter has been making noise about an e-commerce solution for some time now, and if reports are to be believed, the microblogging site is close to finalizing the details of the platform. Primarily, Twitter is working to close a deal with Stripe, which would be an ideal back-end solution for making Twitter-based purchases. From a Front-End perspective, Twitter is in discussions with several e-commerce outlets to arrange purchase through feeds. And according to code found on Fancy.com – which points to mock-ups of a potential Twitter Commerce solution – Twitter is looking for Twitter Commerce tweets to appear within users’ streams, much like Promoted Tweets that advertise products, in addition to working within the Discover section to tailor content to users’ wants and follows. At that point, Twitter would prompt you to enter your credit card information, and handle the purchase from there.
It’s all part of Twitter’s plan to add revenue streams as quickly as possible in light of its IPO. In order to sustain its initial success the company now must worry about erasing the common conception that it is a non-profitable startup, and adding new sources of revenue quickly – and effectively – is one powerful way of doing just that. Whether users take to it, however, will be the most important question facing Twitter’s user experience team as they try to make the platform not only user-friendly, but readily accessible.
Facebook’s Referral Traffic Share Up 48% In Q4 2013
Social discovery and sharing platform Shareaholic released a report looking at referral traffic data from social media sites in Q4 of 2013. Here’s the short of it: Facebook, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Google+ all gained, while Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn lost. But the data says that Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter combine to dominate so much of the Internet’s referral traffic that the numbers don’t actually speak for the other sites in this category – combined, the rest of the sites only had 1% of the total share, so even as their shares jumped around rapidly it’s hard to take those numbers seriously in the big picture. So, for the top three, Facebook’s referral traffic share rose from 10.37% to 15.44%, and Pinterest also rose from 3.68% to 4.79%; Twitter essentially remained level, changing from 1.17% to 1.12%. The takeaway? Facebook, as usual in these sorts of studies, is the real winner, having driven more than twice the referrals of all other platforms combined.
JBL Converts Your Tweets To Music
As part of a new “Tweet Music” campaign, the audio electronics company will turn your tweets into sound if you tweet at them. It works through JBL’s Tweet Music algorithm, which takes words and assigns sounds to them. It has pre-assigned sound clips for certain letters, and so there are nearly 13 billion possible combinations. Users who enter into the campaign by tweeting at them will also be entered into an expenses-paid trip to the 2015 Grammy’s. JBL is pairing the campaign with physical, experiential kiosks outside of the Grammy’s this year so listeners can interact with their custom music before tweeting it out. In the first week, they’ve received 2,600 mentions with their @JBLaudio handle, and have added 3,100 new followers this week; 1,200 songs have been generated with 3,500 listens. It’s a clever ploy by the company, one that, though a tad gimmicky, is technologically interesting enough to hold Twitter’s attention.
Facebook Debuts Trending Topics On The Web
When Facebook announced hashtags, you knew it was only a matter of time until the social network announced trending topics. And following testing on the web and mobile in August, Facebook today launched a redesigned version of the “Trending” section on the web sidebar in the US, UK, Canada, India, and Australia. It showcases personalized lists, based on what you’ve liked and what’s trending across the social network, of the most mentioned words and phrases of the moment, with explanations of why each os trending. The idea is to spur public sharing, drive return visits, and make Facebook a place to go for trending current events – in the way that Twitter is at present. Facebook’s “Trending” section is different from Twitter’s in that there is a reason offered to users for why the trend is happening – as opposed to just a hashtag – to provide a context for the user so that they don’t leave the site to do a web search. And by keeping users on the site longer via these current events topics, it hopes to drive revenue derived from users clicking and sharing ads – an important category of revenue in its post-IPO world.
CES 2014: Consumers Now Wary Of Google, Facebook, Twitter
Consumers are significantly more wary of companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, according to a study by McCann that was discussed at a CES panel led by Ad Age and IPG at CES. People are very sensitive about their private data, and when asked which companies are the greatest threat to the future of privacy 59% cited Facebook and 40% cited Twitter, while 32% responded with Google. These numbers represent a doubling from just one year ago, and it’s no surprise, given the important NSA revelations that have happened since that date.
What’s important to point out, though, is that people aren’t necessarily concerned with what might happen to the data immediately; they’re very concerned with what might happen in the near future as technology’s powers expand. As well, they’re concerned about what happens to their data on the back end, with respect to advertising, how data is bought, sold, and thereafter targeted; broad support was voiced for a Do Not Track system. The important takeaway, for both the advertising and technology industries, is that consumers are beginning to pay much more attention to their data and how its being used in an era of rapidly-advancing technology. Their trust is the foundation for much of these industries, and once it’s gone it will be very tough to win back.
Twitter Vending Machine Gives Away Stuffed Pandas
In Canada, telecommunications company Telus sponsored a vending machine that dispenses stuffed animals. But it’s not any ordinary stuffed animal dispensing machine: passers by who tweet with the hashtag #HomeTweetHome would get a free panda bear from the vending machine. It’s not the first time real world machines have been triggered by social media, nor is the technology behind the system truly groundbreaking; it’s a reminder that campaigns utilizing social media to unlock real-world rewards, when used in the right contexts, can be very effective.
