Tag: twitter

How Brands Are Using “Snapcodes” To Attract Followers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Several digital publishers including The Huffington Post and The Daily Dot have replaced their usual Twitter profile pictures with “Snapcodes,” an account-specific icon generated by Snapchat that doubles as a scannable QR code for easier following. Snapchat users usually find people to follow through phone numbers in their address books, so this offers a good alternative for brand accounts that aren’t typically tied to a phone number. Previously, users would have to know the username and manually search for the brands’ Snapchat accounts in order to follow them.

What Brands Should Do
For brands looking to connect with today’s young audience, utilizing Snapcode on other social media channels to build a following on Snapchat would be a good place to start. More importantly, brands should learn to leverage their social media presence into building a fanbase on new emerging platforms, such as Snapchat and other messaging apps, where today’s consumers are spending more and more time in.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Header image courtesy of Huffington Post’s Twitter Page

Brand Tweets To Appear In Desktop Google Search Results, Too

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Three months after incorporating tweets on search results for US users on mobile devices, Google has finally incorporated tweets into its search results on the desktop as well. Tweets from certified and active brand accounts are now showing up in a “carousel unit” fairly high on the first page of relevant search results, but reportedly there’s no advertising component to this new feature yet. Nevertheless, Twitter is best at real-time content, and Google stands to improve its search results by adding some borrowed timeliness to keep its results fresh.

What Brands Can Do
This move will no doubt further help expand the reach of branded tweets, and if your brand hasn’t been active on social media channels, now isthe time to get the self-serve PR machine started. With the recent rise of social commerce, complete with “buy buttons,” such incorporation also shows potential for extending such ecommerce opportunities into new digital contexts, something that all retail brands should explore.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Twitter Expands Promoted Tweets And Videos To Other Apps

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following Facebook’s announcement last week to expand its mobile ad platform, Twitter is also expanding its ad offerings on mobile, allowing promoted tweets and videos ads to appear in other apps. Previously, Twitter’s Audience Platform only offered app-install ads in mobile apps outside of Twitter.

What Brands Should Do
This move means that brands now can use Twitter’s platform, which operates across a network of thousands of apps, to extend the reach of their promoted videos and tweets, using new ad formats. By employing some of these new high performance ad formats, brands and marketers may find a way to figure out new, efficient ways to reach consumers in today’s mobile-first world.

 

Source: AdAge

Twitter Debuts Live Event-Based Targeting

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier this week, Twitter unveiled event targeting, a new ad tool that aims to help brands and marketers reach users tweeting about major live events like the Super Bowl, Grammys, or the FIFA World Cup in real time. Previously, brands interested in targeting those audiences would have to manually set up the targeting metrics with specific hashtags, keywords and accounts that vary from event to event, a tedious process that this new tool promises to simplify and automate.

What Brands Should Do
Twitter has long dominated the social chatter on live events, and this new tool just made it a lot easier for brands to capitalize on the intense buzz around major events to reach the most engaged audience. Different events also reflect various user interests in sports and entertainment, which brands can also leverage into their targeting efforts.

Source: Marketing Land

Twitter Makes Push For App-Install Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Ad units designed for pushing mobile users to download apps has been one of the hottest ad products recently. According to BI Intelligence, US mobile app-install ad revenue was $3.6 billion in 2014, accounting for about 30% of mobile ad revenue last year, and it is estimated to top $4.6 billion in 2015. So it is understandable that the major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter are all locked in a tight race pushing for ad-install ads on their respective ad platforms. Among them, Facebook seems to be leading the game so far, with Yahoo being a close second.

And now, Twitter is making some extra efforts to make its app-install ad product more appealing to mobile advertisers. It will add videos to app promotion ads so mobile users can see how the app works in action. More importantly, Twitter will soon start charging only for the apps that are fully downloaded, instead of the current industry standard of clickthroughs. Together these two new options offer mobile advertisers a more visually impressive and fairly priced ad unit for driving app downloads, which could just be what Twitter needs to become a contender for the mobile ad dollars. It will also make the decision to advertise on Twitter easier as advertisers will only pay for success and will go in with the knowledge that Twitter is incentivized to make sure these ads perform.

Source: AdAge

 

Twitter Would Like To Exchange Virtual Balloons For Your Birthdate

Posted on by Lab Team

Read the original story on: TechCrunch

Twitter’s minimalistic sign-up process may have helped its user acquisition in the beginning, but it also caused a deficiency in basic user info that the social microblogging service is now trying to fix as it starts to promise advertisers stronger targeting capabilities. For the new “persona-based” ad targeting tools introduced earlier this week, for example, Twitter is reportedly getting some of the biographic info it needs from consumer data companies Acxiom and Datalogix. But why buy it if you can get users to voluntarily offer it?

And that is exactly the logic behind Twitter’s newest addition. The social network launched a new feature today that lets users to put in their birthdates in exchange for animated balloons floating around user profiles on their birthdays. If this serves as any indication, more data-grabbing initiatives like this could be expected from Twitter in the near future.

Twitter Launches Persona-Based Targeting Tools

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original article on: AdWeek

Twitter has been undergoing a “reinvention” phase, and today it launched a new ad tool that will make it easier for brands to target specific groups of consumers based on not only traditional demographic info like age and gender, but also includes some newer, “people-based” metrics. Among the “personas” outlined by Twitter, groups such as college grads, parents, and business decision-makers stand out with their specificity and potential for targeting.

Previously, marketers could piece together similar targeting parameters on Twitter, but the social microblogging service is clearly looking to simplify the process, leveraging its ongoing partnerships with data companies Acxiom and Datalogix to enable such targeting options. Obviously, Twitter knows a lot more about their users than mere demographics – the people one follows indicates individual interests, for example. Privacy issues aside, we we expect twitter to build out this feature to fit their strengths in the future.

With vast amount of data available, digital technology has opened a lot of new ways of targeting and attribution. And it is crucial that brands can choose the right channel and tools to ensure their messages get through to the right audience. To learn more about using behavioral data to target consumer groups, click here to our newest POV on targeting tribes through tech.

 

Header image taken from Twitter Blog

Twitter Starts Testing New Product Pages And Collections

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Following the roll-out of “buy buttons” last fall, Twitter continues to dive deeper into social ecommerce by testing a new feature that allows a “limited group of brand partners” to curate product pages and collections. The new pages will include related tweets and additional information about the products, as well as links to third-party destination sites that will help enable purchasing. Among early adopters, popular consumer electronics review site The Wirecutter stands out with a collection of travel gears. Other notable examples so far include a collection of Game of Thrones-related products, and a page of product recommendations from pop star Demi Lovato.

This new ad feature came right on the heels of Twitter’s announcement of its event-focused “Project Lightning” last week, and an underlying similarity between the two seems clear. Whereas the new “lighting” event page is looking to re-organize and curate disparate tweets to form real-time news coverage, this new “Product Page and Collection” feature aims to leverage editorial curating to create a browse-able shopping experience on Twitter. Whether or not this approach would actually further Twitter’s entry into ecommerce remains to be seen.

Twitter To Reinvent Itself With “Project Lightning”

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Twitter has been undergoing some major changes recently, including a leadership change, eliminating character limit in direct messages, and officially rolling out its autoplaying video ads. And now, reports claim that Twitter has been working on a new project codenamed “Project Lightning” that could help twitter reinvent how people see and search for tweets.

This new project will bring a curated news platform to Twitter, shifting its content focus from user’s timeline to breaking news and events as they happen in real time. A group of editors at Twitter will be handpicking and sorting relevant tweets into various event-based channels, enhancing Twitter’s appeal as a go-to site for real time news and events. Although still a few months away from launching, we could already foresee brands getting on board with timely tweets to get a piece of the amplified attention.

 

Correction: An earlier version of the post misspelled “Project Lighting” as “Lightening”.

Twitter Promises Full Viewability With Auto-Play Video Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek

Twitter has been testing its auto-playing video ads for a couple of months now, and this week it has finally started rolling out this new ad unit on users’ feeds. Pioneered by Facebook and YouTube, auto-playing video has become a standard ad format on social media, which gains the support of brands and advertisers alike for its supposedly stronger impact.

Moreover, the social media is taking a stand against viewability, an issue hindering the growth of digital video ads, as it is promising only to charge on video ads that have been seen 100 percent in full view of the user for more than 3 seconds. Considering that a study claims that nearly 25% of video ad views are fraudulent, this bold promise, combined with its pay-per-view pricing structure, would undoubtedly appeal to the advertisers, and hopefully, help Twitter to catch up with other social platforms in terms of monetization.