Tuesday morning saw me up at, *literally*, the crack of dawn to pilgrimage across the country to Twitter HQ in London.
Once I had finally arrived (cheeeers delayed Bakerloo line), was seated, and over the grave difficulty that is continuing to look-professional-whilst-eating-a-flaky-breakfast-pastry-without-the-aid-of-a-plate, it was time to listen, along with other SMB agency representatives, to what the marketing team had to say.
So here's a roundup, enjoy.
Twitter’s Five Strategic Priorities
At the end of 2015, Twitter’s statistics weren't looking its best. The site saw a stall in user growth, with the 320m average monthly user stat not budging between Q3 & Q4, leading to a drop in shares and a net loss of £62m. Ouch. But Twitter came back with a plan, with the following five priorities to focus their attention:
#Refine: generally sorting out the app and service, improving timelines with the “While you were away” feature and rethinking of the 140 character limit.
#Live: mainly focusing on Periscope, Twitter’s live video streaming app. This content has now been embedded into the Twitter newsfeed instead of in the separate app.
#Creators: Looking after the people who matter: VIT (very important tweeters, obviously), celebs, pop stars, & Kanye West.
#Safety: Sorting out the pesky trolls and strengthening the block function. Includes a (very) recent acquisition of Magic Pony, a machine learning solution for image recognition.
#Developers: basically bring back CEO & founder Jack Dorsey.
Advertising Roadmap
Like everyone these days, Twitter is adapting their product suite to reflect the scope of mobile. Here is a taster of some of the new ad formats and targeting options that will be rolled out in the coming months:
Conversational Ads
Conversational Ads are designed to make it even easier for a user to engage (and then spread) a brand's campaign message. A sort of website card/poll cross, these ads have buttons with customisable text and hashtags which, when selected, load up a ready made tweet for the user to share to their followers.
These are very much engagement focused, and if a user tweets through the ad, they then receive a message back from the brand saying thank you, aw.
Carousel Ads
Twitter has already been working on carousel ads with featured apps, but are now experimenting with normal tweets. The latest ad format lines up a selection of tweets - with images and video - in a swipe-able slideshow. Pretty similar to what we're used to with Facebook:
You're allowed up to 20 of these 'child' tweets in a carousel ad, but five to seven are recommended.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads allow advertisers to serve Promoted Tweets based on recently viewed products. Product feeds will be 'ingested' by the platform and tweets subsequently dynamically created. Basically, we're getting dynamic remarketing on Twitter. No image example I'm afraid so here's the blue bird instead:
Emoji Targeting
Saving the best for last. Seeing as this...
...was the Oxford Dictionary 2015 Word of the Year, (yep, seriously), Twitter is rolling out advertising to people who have recently tweeted or engaged with a tweets featuring emojis. You have to get on board with one of Twitter's Official Partners first but after that you're...
