In an effort to update its offerings, Yahoo has partnered with Twitter to integrate tweets from a number of major news sources into its homepage news feed. This comes on the heels of a major brand overhaul by CEO Marissa Mayer, focused on maximizing personalization of the brand’s products. There has been little chatter about how this upgrade actually applies to Yahoo’s personalization goals, but with their many startup purchases and branding overhaul in progress, big things appear to be on the horizon for Yahoo.
Tag: twitter
SocialBro Introduces Tweet Data
As far as Twitter analytics go, SocialBro is one of the more useful applications currently on the market. Now, though, the Spanish startup is taking a step towards offering data about Tweets themselves, rather than just people. It presents a graph that shows information about how your tweets have performed over time, and you can see the relative popularity of each Tweet in terms o Favorites, retweets, replies and more. You can adjust the data for date range, tweets and replies, and many other parameters. Because SocialBro is geared towards business-oriented Twitter users, the introduction of analytics for specific tweets makes it more attractive to the broad-based, social media marketing sphere.
Your Eyeballs Are Money
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter were assembled on a panel to discuss advertising. The participants expressed some common views on the industry but also some sharp philosophical differences emerged.
Neal Mohan of Google stressed that for advertising they are trying to embrace context, for example mobile vs. desktop and lean forward vs. lean back settings. He also highlighted that measurement represents one of the biggest unsolved problems in the landscape today. It’s critical to be able to measure the efficacy of digital ads in terms of driving sales. Google is currently investing a lot in solving this problem.
Gokul Rajaram from Facebook agreed that context was important, and pointed out that Facebook has been focusing heavily on creating an optimized mobile experience. In fact, a full 23% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile at this stage. The guiding philosophy behind the recently-launched Facebook Home was to put your friends at the center of your mobile experience rather than your apps. It was key, he indicated, that advertising not be interruptive, but that it fit into the flow of the natural way people are using an application.
Kevin Weil of Twitter discussed how the site is “a bridge, not an island”, insomuch as it drives action from sponsored content out into the world. He described the platform as the social soundtrack to TV, pointing out that 95% of social commentary about TV is on Twitter. He feels the two platforms thus make each other stronger for advertisers. Mr. Weil also pointed out that no one typically screenshots a banner ad and shares it, the way people actively retweet promoted tweets within their Twitter feeds.
A difference of opinion emerged into how to credit different digital marketing tools for effectiveness measuring purposes. Facebook’s point of view is that the last click before purchase doesn’t necessarily deserve all of the credit; they feel that brand-building interactions (e.g. Likes, Suggested Posts) play a more important role in driving purchase than conventional wisdom would currently say. Meanwhile Twitter feels as though engagement with Tweets and links therein that drive to purchase are critical, and the “last click” before purchase deservedly gets the lion’s share of attention.
Twitter Opens Ad-Buying To All U.S. Users
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.
Chat Apps Surpass SMS
Messaging apps are proving popular across the globe; indeed, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently claimed that his service is bigger than Twitter. And a new study by Informa, on behalf of the Financial Times, concludes that chat apps have overtaken traditional SMS in terms of message volume. By the end of 2012, there were more messages sent via iMessage, BBM, WhatsApp, and Kik when compared with regular texting. Because SMS has been a traditional resource for wireless carriers, this trend has been worrying for these companies. By the same token, however, SMS is still far ahead in overall user count, and Informa expects providers to pull in $120 billion from texting plans this year. Ultimately though, non-text-message output is expected to reach 41 billion per day in 2013, which is double the number of forecasted texts; WhatsApp already reportedly processes 18 billion messages each day alone. Ultimately though, if carriers want to monetize messaging like texts, it remains to be seen if users will stick around.
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.
Interactive Images Come To Facebook
Marketers and branders got a new tool to reach thousands of followers on Facebook: ThingLink’s interactive images. The platform hit the social media sphere this morning, and allows fans interact with content embedded inside of a single image – be it photos, video, or text – without leaving the Facebook Timeline. ThingLink allows users to enhance images with links to other pieces of content. So when you hover over a main image, icons pop up to demonstrate the additional content. Users just click on these icons to play YouTube videos, audio clips, open other websites, or really do anything that would have previously had to have been done on other websites. For brands, this offers a way to make a deeper impression in front of fans in one place. Though Stipple also put interactive images on Facebook in January, that Facebook is working with other, more innovative developers indicates that this is a trend that is taking off. Indeed, brands have “commonly seen” more than five times as much engagement on Twitter posts using ThingLink images. So to have the technology on Facebook presents a powerful new tool to social media marketers.
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 #Music App Launches
After a week’s worth of teasing, the Twitter music app finally launched. A service for both discovery and streaming, it’s now available at music.twitter.com, as well as in the iOS app store; of yet there is no Android app. #Music is based around a recommendation engine that pulls data from across Twitter and your followers to offer recommendations from the catalogs of iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio. Of primary importance is the Trending chart, which allows you to view – and listen to via iTunes Preview, Spotify, or Rdio – the top trending songs on Twitter. As well, there are Emerging, Suggested, and Now Playing tabs; Emerging takes data from all of Twitter to identify up-and-coming new artists, while Suggested recommends music based on who you follow, and Now Playing takes stock of the music being played at that instant by the people you follow. Listening to the songs is straight forward as well, just log in with any of the previously mentioned services and you should be able to listen to full songs in the app. You can, however, click the iTunes button and be taken to the iTunes Store to purchase the song. How well this catches remains to be seen, but what is definite at the moment is that you’ll soon get to know how good your followers’ taste in music really is.
