Is Twitter the next contender in the social advertising arena? Information from its first ever Analyst Day in November has us guessing. During Analyst Day, Twitter executives shared their ambitious goals and forward-looking predictions to investors.
Here are some key stats from their presentation on Analyst Day:
- 248 million active monthly users on Twitter
- 60,000 advertisers on Twitter
- 9 million “potential” SMB Twitter advertisers
- 29% new ad formats account for one-third of Twitter’s ad revenue
- 185 billion impressions on Twitter content delivered per quarter
- 500 million tweets published every day
In addition to this information, the executives shared predictions and goals all marketers would find interesting:
Native video coming to Twitter summer 2015
When Kevin Weil, vice president of product, talked about new features coming to Twitter, one of them was native video, launching in early 2015. Having already integrated Vines, GIFs and embedded video into the user timeline over this past year, native video makes sense.
Weil said, “…aside from just watching video more easily on Twitter, you should be able to record, edit and share your own videos natively on Twitter, too. Alongside short looping Vine videos, we think you’ll have fun sharing what’s happening in your world through native video.”
According to Twitter, tweets with native video receive better engagement than those with just video links. That’s why Twitter has slowly been beta testing Promoted Video ads with select advertisers.
Takeaways
+Look for Twitter to launch native video to all users and expand Promoted Videos to more advertisers.
Changes to our idea of Twitter Audience
Twitter wants to change the way you think about its audience. While it has 248 million active monthly users or “logged in users”, this number doesn’t include its total “logged out users.” “Logged out users” refers to people who click on a link elsewhere and land on a Twitter page and they aren’t logged in, bring its total to 500 million monthly unique visitors. About 75 million of these users come from search.
Not to mention, Twitter recently introduced Fabric, a mobile app platform meant to lure more developers to its products. Fabric weaves together technology from two companies it recently purchased to tap into the mobile ad market: Crashlytics, an app analytics firm, and MoPub, a mobile-ad exchange.
Takeaways
+Even though people don’t use Twitter, you can still promote your Twitter presence in other ways. Tap into logged out users by embedding your Twitter stream on your website.
+Take a look around Twitter’s new Fabric platform, and see if there’s an opportunity to build your own app or expand on an existing app.
Twitter is focusing on SEO
In its Analyst Day presentation, Twitter outlined one of its goals to “expand reach via distribution partnerships, SEO & syndication.” Twitter also plans to better organize content and improve topic-based search. Given 75 million users come from search, it looks like Twitter is finally going to pay attention to search and improve users search experience.
Takeaways
+Plan to optimize your Twitter content for search by using hashtags in tweets where appropriate.
+Be sure your website is properly optimized for search. Your keywords and content on your site may come into play for your Twitter content optimization.
It’s time to start paying more attention to Twitter as a key global advertiser as it expands its reach. We’ll be watching as Twitter expands beyond its audience and develops innovative ad products to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
