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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
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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%
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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
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Changes to the interface have irked
existing users
Flat interface – dingbat symbols
Surfacing conversations – “blue lines”
Surfacing recommendations
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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.
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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
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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
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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.”
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Highlighting photos
Moving away from
the vertical
chronological tweets
timeline
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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
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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
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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.
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Is there a role from brands in helping
people navigate their way through Twitter?
AJAX NETFLIX
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1. Research
2. Social commerce
3. In-twitter dwell
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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1. Research
2. Social commerce
3. In-twitter dwell
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Twitter are stepping up social
commerce capabilities
Building on some single application successes with Amex back in 2012
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Brands have used Twitter commerce as
an exchange for social advocacy
DAISY TWEET SHOP PAY WITH A TWEET
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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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1. Research
2. Social commerce
3. In-twitter dwell
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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.
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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
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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.
