It’s fair to say that Twitter hasn’t had the best press recently and if you look around at the dozens of 2016 advertising predictions you won’t find many suggesting that its luck is going to change soon. But I beg to differ. Yes, it is going through something of a perception crisis, but underneath the headlines the platform is well-placed to have its best year. Advertisers should look beyond the sensationalised doom and gloom to see the real potential on offer, but doing so means rethinking some key points.
Twitter isn’t about tweeting
It’s counterintuitive but crucial to understanding the issues – Twitter has previously said that around 40% of its active users don’t Tweet. Considering Twitter’s total audience is close to a billion people, many of whom encounter tweets embedded on other sites or visit Twitter.com without being logged in, in total only about 15% post to the platform. Honestly this doesn’t matter as long as that core is producing enough content to keep the other 85% of users interested. It’s also in line with my own experiences of how people spend more time on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook consuming content than they do creating it.
Much of the discussion around new Twitter functionality focuses on whether it makes it easier for new users to tweet, but the real guiding star should be whether it makes it easier for them to explore content. Twitter has accepted this in its product developments (better video integration, Moments and improved trends) but its advertising story is only starting to catch up – having historically focused heavily on the value of interaction and selling primarily on a cost-per-engagement model.
10,000 characters doesn’t lose their unique selling point (USP)
Twitter’s rumoured plans to relax its 140-character limit are therefore nothing to do with letting us ramble a bit more and everything to do with making it a better platform for publishing and reading content. Clicking a link and leaving Twitter every time you want to read an article is a slow and broken experience, especially for new users who don’t know their way back.
Tweets of 10,000 characters would achieve much the same as Instant Articles do for Facebook and would almost certainly still only show up as truncated snippets. Twitter quietly announced its take on native long-form content last October and CEO Jack Dorsey hinted the intention to go beyond 140 characters by posting a screenshot of explanatory text (a hack that already allows for longer tweets).
Brevity has certainly been a catalyst for creativity on the platform, but its USP has always been its immediacy and openness. That’s even clearer when you look at Twitter and Periscope together and is well-encapsulated by their vision to be the “live connection to culture”. Facebook may be toying around with trends, unfiltered feeds around sports events and live video streaming but when news is breaking in the world, Twitter is still the best place to catch it.
Flicking the financial billion switch
Twitter is on the verge of truly opening up its wider scale for advertisers. The so-called “audience platform” can already take a tweet and make it appear as an advert within thousands of other unrelated mobile apps and Twitter is publicly testing serving ads to hundreds of millions more logged-out users who visit the site.
The rise of video finally makes it possible to monetise embedded Tweets too – its Amplify product puts video pre-roll advertising in front of content from media owners including the NBA, Sky Sports and the Brit Awards, and there’s an option for that advertising to then show up when those tweets are embedded across other news sites and blogs. This wider scale is something no other platform can offer.
While Wall Street might be hung up on Twitter’s slowing user growth, its profitability remains impressive. Third-quarter results saw users up 12% year-on-year but revenue rose 58% (to $569.2m), the second-fastest growth of more than 100 large technology companies, according to Bloomberg. Nearly all of this revenue comes from Twitter’s 320 million active users but chief operating officer Adam Bain estimates that logged out users would each be worth $2.5 each per year to advertisers, versus $4 for logged in users – an additional $1.3bn in revenue waiting to be activated.
Rebooting the story
Twitter’s 2016 has started painfully with a raft of senior leaders departing but this is hardly unexpected given the new leadership at the top.
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show Twitter showed marketers a rich product pipeline, some of which is already coming to fruition as Periscope videos play out live in the Twitter newsfeed. Any marketer who thinks of Twitter as just a place for short, real-time, text updates should look at how Tesco used the first-ever UK promoted moment: its #FeelGoodCookBook used a vertical video format to be completely immersive on a mobile device.
Twitter is a powerful visual platform with guaranteed visibility on video advertising, targeting options that allow you to be relevant without always being real time, and ever-maturing buying and frequency capping options. Its biggest challenge has always been reach, and only time will tell if Twitter can move that conversation past one of active user numbers.
Flicking that billion switch means admitting to advertisers that engagement isn’t everything and that getting millions of people to passively watch Twitter’s content is itself still a pretty powerful marketing tool, but it should find Facebook has done a lot to prepare this trail. Twitter will have to win over the press, though, because more marketing decisions than we might care to admit are made based on headlines and opinions. If Twitter’s bosses can get people to rethink, 2016 is theirs for the taking.
Jerry Daykin is digital partner at Carat Global. You can follow his campaign for #DigitalSense in marketing on Twitter @jdaykin
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