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Why We Love Twitter Key Facts (And Brands Should Too!)

by Tweepforce 0 Comments
Why We Love Twitter Key Facts (And Brands Should Too!)

Recently Twitter revealed their Q2 earnings for Year 2014 and, in a huge surprise to its critics, Twitter has posted substantial growth in terms of monthly active users and revenue, and as a result their share price surged by 30%. We have compiled all the key facts that have contributed enormously to Twitter’s recent success and can be very useful to help brands to use Twitter to grow their businesses.

1: Twitter monthly active users (MAU) have grown by 24% and are now around 271m.

2: 640 timeline views per MAU in Q2.

3: Unlike critics’ estimate, only 5% of MAU accounts are considered as spam.

4: 173bn Total Timeline views in Q2, up by 15%.

Twitter MAU Timeline Views

% of Twitter spam users

5: Quarterly revenue up by 124% to $312m.

6: Ad revenue up by 129% to $277m.

7: Data licensing revenue up by 90% to $35m.

8: Ad revenue is $1.6 / 1000 timeline views.

9: Ad revenue is $1.15/MAU.

Twitter revenue q2 2014
Twitter timeline revenue

10: In Q2 brands answered 297,478 fan questions on Twitter, compared to 61,707 on Facebook.

11: Twitter accounted for 2.5% of the world’s mobile ads.

12: Twitter’s recent acquisitions of Gnip (data licensing), CardSpring (Card payment) and Mad Bits (image processing) indicate a strong inclination towards facilitating commerce for brands.

13: Dick Costolo believes the embedded tweet features takes Twitter’s reach beyond 271m MAU to 1bn people.

Twitter recap for businesses, brands and digital marketers

by Tweepforce 0 Comments
Twitter recap for businesses, brands and digital marketers

Since Twitter launched its IPO, the company has been updating its products and services almost daily to speed up the monetisation. We have summarised all the recent launches for digital marketers inside or outside of companies, so that they can remain on top of this ever-evolving real-time social network.

1 Extended their advertising products outside USA

On 13 November, Twitter announced that small- and medium-sized businesses in the UK, Ireland and Canada will now be able to make use of its self-serve advertising platform.

Twitter’s suites of ad products include Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends. 

Earlier, all businesses outside the US had to coordinate with Twitter in order to place their ads, which limited the social network’s reach. With this announcement, it is likely that more businesses will now sign on to place ads on the network, increasing its revenue streams.

2. Align advertising to TV Programs

Twitter announced the availability of TV ad targeting on Twitter. According to Twitter:

“TV ad targeting enables marketers to engage directly with people on Twitter who have been exposed to their ads on TV. Synchronized Twitter and TV ad campaigns make brand messages more engaging, interactive and measurable, while making it easy for marketers to run always-on Twitter campaigns that complement and amplify their TV creative.”

However, TV ad targeting for Promoted Tweets is available in a limited beta to selected partners running national TV commercials in the U.S.

 3. Custom Timeline on TweetDeck and Developer API

Twitter will let you build custom timelines based on topics, hashtags and more from TweetDeck. Twitter has also introduced an API to allow developers to build this functionality into their products.

This is an extension to their list service and will allow users to create powerful streams of information out of Twitter’s open data, effectively allowing anyone to create individual streams of data custom-made to a topic. The topics could be anything that’s comprised in a tweet, such as hashtags, a phrase like ‘going out’ or event-specific keywords like ‘X-Factor’ or ‘Tech Meetup’.

 4. DM option is removed and Block User is reinstated

Just a month after the public backlash following an abundance of spamming, Twitter has just removed its option for users to receive direct messages (DM) from any follower, whether or not that follower is being followed on Twitter. DMs can now only be sent to a user who is following you.

Under the short-lived change on Thursday, a blocked Twitter user could view or tweet at the person who blocked him or her, but that activity would have been rendered invisible to the victim, as if the offending account did not exist. Five hours later, Twitter canceled the change, and reverted the “block” feature to its original setting.

Takeaway for businesses

Clearly Twitter is still evolving, with many products coming to market and some being removed, but the gist is that Twitter, with real-time data, especially when people are watching TV or following live events, can be a formidable channel for marketers to promote their products and services. And with the introduction of their self-service advertising channel, it has become easier to promote things on this network. The marketer should also not forget that Twitter is still one of the most open networks and there are many tools, including TweepForce, out there to help them promote and transact on Twitter. 

Twitterati Reaction on Twitter’s IPO Filing [#Infographics]

by Tweepforce 0 Comments
Twitterati Reaction on Twitter’s IPO Filing [#Infographics]

Twitter’s IPO filing was made public on 3October 2013 and here is how Twitterverse teared FORM S-1 and tweeted real numbers, or statistics related to company!

What is Twitter?

Active Users and Tweets

Mobile Users

Revenue

Profit and Loss

Revenue Streams

Revenue per User

Twitter IPO Valuation

Share Distribution

Staff/Employees

What is not disclosed?

Tweepforce Roundup (23 Sep): Twitter Trending , Customer services and Multiple Accounts

by Tweepforce 0 Comments
Tweepforce Roundup (23 Sep): Twitter Trending , Customer services and Multiple Accounts

Tweepforce Twitter Roundup brings together all stories related to Twitter applications and platform updates and how these developments can help businesses to leverage this platform for business and product development.

Brands maintain multiple Twitter Accounts

Brandwatch analyses how over 250 leading brands are using Twitter. This includes how many accounts a brand maintains on Twitter. They found that:
•The number of brands using multiple Twitter accounts has increased from 7% to 63% over the last three years.
•In 2012, 35% of brands used multiple accounts, while the majority had just one.
•A common use of multiple accounts is to have one that allows for engagement – mostly in the form of customer service – and another for offers and company news.
•Dell has the most Twitter accounts (44), each of them covering a different department.

Takeaway for businesses:

Small businesses can also take a leaf out of the growing popularity of multiple accounts among big brands, to cater to various audiences in a distinct way. However, small businesses with limited resources might have to use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to make sure all accounts are synced and managed properly, as managing multiple accounts can be very time consuming and costly.

Twitter Finding New ways to Suggest Who to Follow!

Recently, Twitter launched a mysterious account called “Magic Recs”. This account delivers real time, tailor-made recommendations for users and content via direct message. Its foundation is straight forward: Twitter users that follow “Magic Recs” receive random direct messages that highlight accounts that people in your Twitter network have recently started following.

Takeaway for businesses:
Magic Recs is a unique initiative to discover relevant new Twitter accounts and tweets, beyond Twitter’s current features such as on site/application suggestions and an email newsletter. Businesses must be aware of, and make use of, innovations like “Magic Recs”, to ensure that they keep on top of Twitter advancements to grow their follower base, especially when it is free.

Secrete Behind Twitter Trending Topics

To be featured in Twitter trending is the ultimate aim for any marketer to get some real traction on Twitter, and knowing the popularity of Twitter trends, the company has also launched its most expensive advertising product so far: Promoted Trends.

According to estimates, Promoted Trends cost from around $100k/month, so it is far out of reach of small and medium-sized businesses. However Cision Media has done some recent analysis of both global and local trends and given some insight into the logic of trending topics.

Takeaway for business for Trending Topics:
1.Choose a non-peak times, like early morning, when people aren’t tweeting along to TV programmes.
2.Use a new hashtag so that its rise is more pronounced.
3.Hit as wide an audience as possible in a limited time – the sharper the peak, the more chance you have of trending.

Twitter Advertising has Made Customer Service Very Public and Real Time

Annoyed with the way British Airways was tackling the issue of his father’s lost luggage, businessman Hasan Syed decided to shout about it on Twitter. But rather than just a normal status update, Hasan bought a promoted tweet. Six hours after the tweet went live, it was picked up by technology blog Mashable and then read by thousands of Twitter users, retweeted and commented on.

But BA took another four hours to react with the following message:

“Sorry for the delay in responding, our Twitter feed is open 09:00-17:00 GMT. Please DM [direct message] your baggage ref and we’ll look into this.”

In other words, for British Airways the damage was done as this tweet was also picked up from BBC to CNN, and reached a huge audience.

Takeaway for Businesses:
1. The good news is that Twitter has made customer service real time and a two-way stream, but if requests and queries are not dealt with promptly, brands can incur substantial reputation damage.
2. Use Twitter advance search or tracking tools to ensure relevant tweets are picked up as soon as they go live, so that appropriate action can be taken.
3. Identify Twitter as one of the preferred mediums of customer management, so that queries made on this can be dealt as soon as possible.