GigaOM » promoted tweets

Twitter seeks more, better advertising with new API

Eliza Kern — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:06:06 +0000

Looking to manage more than a few promoted tweets for your company? The arrival of the Twitter advertising API could spell changes for how you go about that. The company announced the API’s arrival on Wednesday, a product that will allow brands to manage tweets across multiple platforms and on a larger scale than was previously available. The company has initially launched with a select few partners, including Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital.

Twitter explained the release and what it means for brands in a blog post:

“What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies. Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers. With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.”

The companies will use Twitter’s API to let brands manage Twitter advertising on a larger scale through existing analytics products from companies like Adobe or Salesforce, letting the brands manage promoted tweets and target them at specific audiences. Some of the companies that Twitter is launching with have already been experimenting with the product, and unsurprisingly appear to be satisfied so far, like Adobe, which wrote a blog post pointing to improvements in advertising coming from the API integration:

“Our work has integrated Twitter’s Promoted Product Ads APIs into Adobe Media Optimizer, the only cross-channel digital advertising platform in the industry that manages, optimizes and accurately forecasts the performance of ad campaigns across social, search and display.

By using granular targeting, testing different bid levels and segmenting campaigns by regions, Media Optimizer was able to increase our follower base by 63%. At the same time, we saw the total Cost Per Follow (CPF) decrease by close to 60%, or approximately $2.00. Two key components of our CPF improvement were accessing less expensive impressions as well as achieving better conversion rates from those impressions.”

Twitter has previously let companies manage promoted Tweets, but giving them the ability to target specific audiences and locations makes sense as Twitter makes it easier to advertise on its platform generating revenue as it aims for an expected IPO later this year or next year.

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Twitter updates promoted tweets, allows more restricted targeting

Eliza Kern — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:35:10 +0000

Twitter announced several updates to its promoted tweets feature on Thursday, allowing brands and marketers to improve the accuracy of their targeting and to make promoted tweets more relevant in searches. Twitter started experimenting with promoted tweets back in 2010, and they will be a crucial product in the company’s focus on monetization.

“Every day, millions of people use Twitter search to understand what’s happening in real time. Search is also where we debuted the very first Promoted Tweets back in April 2010, and it remains a great way to reach a relevant audience with your content,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Among the changes that Twitter outlined in a blog post Thursday:

The launch of negative keyword targeting will allow brands to note which words they do not want associated with their tweets. Twitter used the example of a bacon company trying to disassociate with Kevin Bacon. But with cases like a McDonald’s marketing campaign gone horribly wrong for the company, or advocates attaching a spoofed hashtag not approved by Victoria’s Secret to the company’s name, it’s easy to see why companies would seek negative as well as positive keyword targeting.
A bulk import tool will allow brands to upload the keywords they want to use.
Brands will be able to automatically attach a promoted tweet to trending topics. Kate Middleton announces she’s pregnant? Go ahead and attach your promoted tweets for baby clothes to the trending topic.

For Twitter, this year is all about monetization, and if it can make promoted tweets and in-stream advertising work, especially on mobile, it will have a major leg up on companies like Facebook, which have struggled more with the task.

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Twitter expected to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2014

Eliza Kern — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 23:50:25 +0000

Twitter is set to reach $1 billion in sales by 2014, significantly outpacing analyst predictions and demonstrating the company’s advertising viability, sources tell Bloomberg.

The company earned $139.5 million in 2011, analysts say, which means if Bloomberg’s sources are correct, demand for advertising is taking off among companies looking to grow their presence on the platform.

Bloomberg’s sources said the company could change or alter those predictions, which, of course, aren’t exactly official.

Twitter will likely reach this milestone slightly more than eight years after it was founded in March 2006, putting it behind companies like Facebook, which took six years to hit $1 billion in sales, and Google, which took five, Bloomberg reports.

The revenue projections demonstrate that Twitter feels pretty good about the strength of the company’s business model, which was something of a question mark in its earlier years. Twitter was reluctant to emphasize the business side of its product, but has recently expanded its focus on advertising.

Advertising on Twitter takes the form of promoted Tweets, trends and accounts. Twitter also recently rolled out self-serve advertising for smaller businesses looking for promotion.

The company has wrestled with advertising revenue in the past, sharing the concern of companies like Facebook in trying to determine whether “ads inserted into social activity actually work,” as Matthew Ingram wrote earlier this year. The monetary value of a Twitter retweet or a Facebook “like” is still a question mark for brands looking to advertise, which The Wall Street Journal explored recently.

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Twitter CEO: We have 100M active users

Erica Ogg — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:55:56 +0000

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo lifted the veil on Twitter user statistics at a small press event on Thursday morning. Besides revealing the company’s active users, he talked about features it is working on, the expansion of promoted tweets, its impressive user growth, and why he’s “excited” that 4 out of 10 active users don’t tweet.

Some stats on Twitter users and usage, none of which includes spambots, Costolo noted:

There are 100 million global active users on Twitter. According to the company, a “global active” is anyone who logs into Twitter at least once a month. Half of them log in every day.
Of active users, 55 percent tweet on mobile devices. “We see tremendous growth in mobile, about 40 percent quarter on quarter growth on Twitter on mobile the past three or four quarters,” he said. That’s up over 80 percent since the beginning of the year. “I was surprised when I got here in November ’09 how small the usage of Twitter on mobile was. But that’s now about 55 percent of our actives.”
There are 400 million monthly uniques to twitter.com. That’s according to Google analytics. And it’s up from 250 million uniques from the beginning of the year. “There are still a lot of people who don’t log into Twitter, but use Twitter every day.”
Forty percent of active users don’t Tweet, but they do read. “We’re excited about that,” said Costolo. Why? “That’s an indicator Twitter is becoming mainstream,” said Costolo. That means there are that many people “who are active on Twitter, but don’t publish — yet.”

New features and what’s to come:

Simplicity and consistency between devices and platforms. “With Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, you’ll see the interfaces become more consistent,” according to Costolo.
Tightening the feeback loops. “The activity feed was first piece of that,” he said. That means making it obvious that if you follow someone or are followed, you can see that and react to it.
Experimentation. “The growth team is focused almost exclusively on experiment, experiment, experiment.” The team is coming up with ideas, rolling them out to a small percentage of users. “If they work, roll them out to 100 percent of users.”

You will start to see promoted tweets everywhere soon.

That means promoted tweets from companies you don’t follow. You’ll see them “everywhere you see Twitter,” he said. That means third-party platforms or any Twitter syndication services. “We’ve been super cautious about the expansion of our ad program,” said Costolo. “Based on engagement ratings and based on capabilities our revenue team has developed that we’re ready to expand further.”

On Google+:

There’s “no doubt they’ll be able to pull in a massive amount of users,” because they’re combining it with search, mobile and Gmail and YouTube. “You can’t not see that little red number in the top bar,” said Costolo.
Costolo sees Twitter as different from Google’s social network in terms of simplicity. “Where we think about ourselves is we think about Twitter in terms of how can we simplify it even further. How can we take [stuff] out.”
“Other services say you have to use your real name because they think they can monetize that better and get more information about you.”

IPO next year? Probably not.

“We have what can only be referred to as a truckload of money in the bank. We were able to do that on favorable terms to grow the business on our own terms. We want to remain independent . . . and not be beholden to public markets until we feel like we want to be.”

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Project Runway brings fan voting to Twitter

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:00:22 +0000

Whenever hit Lifetime series Project Runway is on TV, viewers tend to tune-in live and use social networks to discuss what’s happening. Now in its ninth season, the show is attempting to leverage the power of social networks to help drive awareness and live tune-in with a new Fan Favorite award determined by Twitter votes.

Starting with the Season 9 premiere of Project Runway on Thursday, July 28, fans will be able to vote for their favorite contestants on the show during each episode, with a $10,000 prize going to the winner at the end of the season. To determine which contestants fans are most passionate about, A+E has established a personal hashtag for each contestant, and will be aggregating “votes” based on how many Tweets are received for each contestant.

A promotional video provided by A&E explaining how the voting will work is embedded below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

A+E Digital is working with social media measurement firm Mass Relevance to count the votes and to filter out vote spam, ensuring users don’t try to game the system by setting up dummy accounts or writing scripts to pound Twitter’s servers with Fan Favorite votes. (Mass Relevance was also recently tapped to provide data from President Obama’s recent Twitter Town Hall.)

The results will be posted on the Project Runway website, but they will also be updated weekly and will air within episodes to let viewers know which contestant is leading week-by-week. In addition, Project Runway hopes to drive awareness of the contest by including the designer’s hashtag each time his or her name is displayed on-screen.

The Fan Favorite winner doesn’t have to be one of the finalists for the show, according to A+E SVP of Digital Media Evan Silverman. That’s important, because it’s often third- or fourth- or even fifth-place contestants that most resonate with viewers. Even after someone has been eliminated, he or she will still be eligible to win the Fan Favorite prize, and viewers can still vote for that contestant.

Creating a social media tie-in like Fan Favorite is just one way A+E hopes to increase viewership of the already-popular TV show. In an email, Silverman wrote, “There is no doubt that if you can generate a significant level of buzz and awareness through social media platforms then that engagement translates to awareness for your show.”

For a show like Project Runway, which already has a large base of viewers tweeting during the show, creating this type of contest is just one way to boost awareness and engagement even further. Silverman writes:

“We think that by leveraging Twitter in a season-long, real-time voting contest, we’ll be able to increase the level of engagement significantly… and to let the fans give their favorite designer a great prize: $10,000.”

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Twitter Annotations and the Future of the Semantic Web

Mathew Ingram — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:00:42 +0000

Unlike some of Twitter’s other services, the upcoming launch of Annotations doesn’t involve a product, but a rethinking of the way the social network functions. The changes involved could have a tremendous impact on not just on the network, but on the nature of the web itself.

Twitter to Ad Competitors: Go Pound Sand

Liz Gannes — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:07:21 +0000

Twitter said today that it will no longer allow third-party ads to be injected into users’ Twitter timelines. The ban is particularly interesting given it’s almost exactly what the company’s own recently announced advertising platform, Promoted Tweets, does — insert paid and relevant tweets into timelines (as well as search results pages). Fresh off the heels of developer anger and confusion over Twitter’s unexpected efforts to launch and acquire mobile clients last months, the news was carefully laid out in a long blog post by Twitter COO Dick Costolo.

To be clear, Twitter will continue to allow developers to display ads around user timelines. And further, many developers already don’t include ads within streams, knowing that Twitter monetization is a touchy and evolving topic, even if the company had not previously formally clarified its stance. Costolo said he expected today’s API terms of service changes to negatively impact “a few” companies. One seeming target: Ad.ly, which bills itself as “an in-stream advertising platform that matches top-tier Twitter publishers with top-tier brands.”

Costolo explained in the blog post that Twitter’s decision hinges on the concept of near-term vs. long-term monetization opportunities (he used some variation of those terms at least nine times). Costolo said Twitter wants to protect user value and the health of its platform, while “Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience.”

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, meanwhile, are displayed “in a manner that preserves the integrity and relevance of the timeline,” Costolo said.

Twitter shares half of the revenue collected for Promoted Tweets with developers who display them. Costolo justified that share by saying Twitter pays for maintaining its network, fighting spam, scaling the service, supporting users and paying its staff of 200 (and growing). He said there continue to be opportunities to build on top of Twitter, including “third-party monetization engines,” as well as metadata around tweets, vertical clients, and analytics.

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