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Twitter chief Jack Dorsey: ‘We’re doubling down on adtech’

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By Jennifer Faull.

witter’s co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey said he plans to “double down” on adtech investment, saying the company has learned lessons from past mistakes that could see it pivot towards forging partnerships with third parties rather than acquiring or building its own offering.

“Advertising is our business and technology is how we manifest that,” said Dorsey at the Cannes Lions festival today (21 June.) “We’re definitely not out of the adtech investment phase. We’re doubling down. Especially with the hire of Bruce [Falck]. He’s taken right to it.”

After an exhaustive search, Bruce Falck joined the company earlier this year as general manager of revenue product, reporting directly to Dorsey (previously he was the chief executive of adtech outfit Turn). That hire was very much seen as a push by Twitter to bring a advertisers a more targeted and measurable offering as well as stand up against the Google and Facebook, which control in excess of 70% of the market.

Falck joined having spent much of his career working for adtech businesses. Prior to his tenure at Turn, he served as chief operating officer at video ad company BrightRoll and developed display advertising products at Google.

According to reports, not confirmed by Twitter, it has since been reconsidering several of its advertising products, including the direct response business, parts of the Promoted Tweets product, and TellApart, the digital ad platform it acquired in 2015.

Speaking on what has went wrong in the past on the advertising side, Dorsey said that it simply “didn’t always prioritize [it] in the right way.”

“We acquired companies or platforms and didn’t give them the options that they needed or tie it together with everything else that we’re doing,” he said. “And that doesn’t set up the acquisition for success. So, we’re [now] being really deliberate in what we look at and why.”

He went on to say that moving forward it would look to “buy versus build” its adtech offering, although he did add that it may also look to pursue this strategy by partnering with third-party tie-ups.

“We’ve tended to build a lot in the company. When we started it was before there was a public cloud that we could use and that set the DNA of the company. But we need to change that mindset. We don’t need to build everything, but we also don’t need to acquire everything. We can go through third parties and just really focus on what our strengths are,” he said.

Rebuilding from the inside out

At the beginning of the year, Twitter set about on a rebuild of the company to “get back to basics” and redefine itself around one core mission – being “the best and fastest place to see what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about.”

In a three-pronged attack, it set about re-establishing its execution of the product (“we needed a lot more discipline”), better marketing to “tell the story of what Twitter is” and focusing “our energy on our strengths” on the users already had, rather than trying to attract more.

During this reset phase, it was forced to layoff nearly a tenth of its global workforce – around 350 people – which Dorsey said was one of his darkest periods at the company.

“It was heartbreaking,” he explained. “I remember the night before, I hand wrote thank you cards to everyone we were letting go. I was up until 2am although, unfortunately, there was mishap with mailing and we couldn’t get them to everyone on time. But it was really the toughest thing. It’s still so painful to think about and I wasn’t expecting to do anything like that in my life.”

However, he said it’s now seeing results from the changes. Twitter surprised analysts with a strong performance for the first quarter for the year, seeing a spike in both user growth and earning.

“It now gives us breathing room to take bigger steps and do some non-linear things,” he hinted. “We want to bring a whole lot more creativity back into the organization and more playfulness with what we’re focused on. I’m really excited about this year.”

For more news from Cannes Lions follow the dedicated news stream on The Drum website

Feature Image: Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and chief executive, was speaking at Cannes Lions 2017

By Jennifer Faull

Jen Faull is deputy news editor at The Drum with a remit to cover the latest developments in the retail and FMCG sectors. Based in London, she has interviewed major business figures including top marketers from Mondelez, Unilever, Tesco, and Lidl.

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Positive Emotions Are More Contagious Than Negative Ones on Twitter

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Sharing happy news with your Twitter followers? Odds are, they’re more likely to share it than a negative post according to a recent study.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An analysis of 3,800 randomly chosen Twitter users found that emotions spread virally through Twitter feeds – with positive emotions far more likely to spread than negative ones.

“What you tweet and share on social media outlets matters. Often, you’re not just expressing yourself – you’re influencing others,” said Emilio Ferrara, lead author of the study and a computer scientist at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute. Ferrara collaborated with Zeyao Yang of Indiana University.

Ferrara and Yang used an algorithm that measures the emotional value of tweets, rating them as positive, negative or neutral. They compared the sentiment of a user’s tweet to the ratio of the sentiments of all of the tweets that appeared in that user’s feed during the hour before. Higher-than-average numbers of positive tweets in the feed were associated with the production of positive tweets, and higher-than-average numbers of negative tweets were associated with the production of negative tweets.

About 20 percent of Twitter users were deemed highly susceptible to what the researchers described as “emotional contagion” – with more than half of their tweets affected. Those users were four times more likely to be affected by positive tweets than negative ones.

Those least likely to be affected by emotional contagion were still a little less than twice as likely to be affected by positive tweets as negative ones. Over all users, regardless of susceptibility, positive emotions were found to be more contagious than negative emotions.

The study builds on decades of research demonstrating first that emotions can be spread through person-to-person contacts, and now finding that they can spread through online interactions as well.

Facebook drew criticism last year for attempting to demonstrate a similar effect by tweaking 700,000 users’ news feeds. Unlike that experiment, Ferrara and Yang did not manipulate what Twitter users were experiencing – rather, they simply observed what was already happening and analysed it.

So what does that mean for marketers? Positive news tweets are more likely to go viral than negative tweets…especially if they contain positive emotions! Get that smiley emoji ready for lauch!

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@Millennials Wary of #Twitter

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As marketers, we must be aware that Millennials are low on trust when reading the medium.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study indicates young adults have a healthy mistrust of the information they read on Twitter.

Nearly anyone can start a Twitter account and post 140 characters of information at a time, bogus or not, a fact the study’s participants seemed to grasp. This is according to Kimberly Fenn, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University.

“Our findings suggest young people are somewhat wary of information that comes from Twitter,” said Fenn. “It’s a good sign.”

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is the first to examine social media and false memory. Participants were college students from the so-called Millennial Generation. Twitter, with 230 million users, is most popular among people in their teens and 20s.

Fenn and MSU colleagues showed 74 undergraduates a series of images on a computer that depicted a story of a man robbing a car. False information about the story was then presented in a scrolling text feed that bore a high resemblance to Twitter or in a feed from a more traditional online source.

The researchers tested whether the students integrated the bogus information into their minds, which psychologists call false memory. The results showed that when the participants read the “Twitter” feed, they were much less likely to form false memories about the story.

Fenn said the students were more mistrustful of the Twitter feed than they were of the more traditional feed.

“We propose young adults are taking into account the medium of the message when integrating information into memory,” Fenn said.

 

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Twitter-Monitoring System Detects Riots Faster than the Police

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Think social media like Twitter are just for fun and a place to put your advertising message? Well, it turns out Twitter can be useful for other things as well.

Social media can be an invaluable source of information for police when managing major disruptive events, new research from Cardiff University has shown.

An analysis of data taken from the London riots in 2011 showed that computer systems could automatically scan through Twitter and detect serious incidents, such as shops being broken in to and cars being set alight, before they were reported to the Metropolitan Police Service.

The computer system could also discern information about where the riots were rumoured to take place and where groups of youths were gathering.

The study comes just days after the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police claimed that police would face “real challenges” tackling a repeat of the 2011 riots following years of budget cuts.

The new research, published in the peer-review journal ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, showed that on average the computer systems could pick up on disruptive events several minutes before officials and over an hour in some cases.

The researchers believe that their work could enable police officers to better manage and prepare for both large and small scale disruptive events.

Co-author of the study Dr Pete Burnap, from Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: “We have previously used machine-learning and natural language processing on Twitter data to better understand online deviance, such as the spread of antagonistic narratives and cyber hate.

“In this research we show that online social media are becoming the go-to place to report observations of everyday occurrences – including social disorder and terrestrial criminal activity. We will never replace traditional policing resource on the ground but we have demonstrated that this research could augment existing intelligence gathering and draw on new technologies to support more established policing methods.”

Scientists are continually looking to the swathes of data produced from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to help them to detect events in real-time.

Estimates put social media membership at approximately 2.5 billion non-unique users, and the data produced by these users have been used to predict elections, movie revenues and even the epicentre of earthquakes.

In their study the research team analysed 1.6m tweets relating to the 2011 riots in England, which began as an isolated incident in Tottenham on August 6 but quickly spread across London and to other cities in England, giving rise to looting, destruction of property and levels of violence not seen in England for more than 30 years.

The researchers used a series of machine-learning algorithms to analyse each of the tweets from the dataset, taking into account a number of key features such as the time they were posted, the location where they were posted and the content of the tweet itself.

Results showed that the machine-learning algorithms were quicker than police sources in all but two of the disruptive events reported.

When the first reports of disorder occurring in Enfield were received by the police, the researchers showed that their system could have picked up this information from Twitter 1 hour and 23 minutes earlier.

Dr Nasser Alsaedi, who recently completed his PhD at Cardiff under the supervision of Dr Burnap said: “Coming from a policing background myself I see the need for this type of cutting edge research every day. I wanted to develop a thesis that could have a real impact in real-world policing. I would like to see this implemented alongside the established decision-making processes.”

Cardiff University’s Social Data Science Lab, within which Dr Burnap is a Director, have an ongoing partnership with the Metropolitan Police Service aimed at using social media for the benefit of security and policing.

 

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Twitter is the Prime Social Media Network for World Leaders

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So who is the most followed icon?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers.

Burson-Marsteller’s Twiplomacy study is an annual global survey of how world leaders, governments and international organisations use social media.

So what has the latest study unearthed? Well, religion is still relevant even in these modern times. Pope Francis is the most followed icon on Twitter. The Pontiff is ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Pope Francis has a combined total of 33,716,301 followers on his nine language accounts, ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump with 30,133,036 followers and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with 30,058,659 followers,

Twitter is the prime social network used by 276 heads of state and government, and foreign ministers, in 178 countries, representing 92 percent of all United Nations (UN) member states. Facebook is the second-most used social platform by world leaders, with 169 governments having established official pages. However, world leaders have, on average, twice as many followers on their Facebook pages as followers on Twitter. Data for Twiplomacy, which updated the studies about Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope, was captured in May 2017 using Burson-Marsteller’s proprietary Burson tools, CrowdTangle.com and Twitonomy.com.

President Trump is among a very small group of leaders who manage their own Twitter accounts, and his tweets have generated 166 million interactions (likes and retweets) over the past 12 months – including the nearly four months since he was sworn in as U.S. President – almost five times as many as Modi with 35 million interactions.

Saudi Arabia’s @KingSalman is the most effective world leader on Twitter based on the average number of retweets per original tweet. Of his ten tweets over the past year, King Salman has received an average of 147,456 retweets. President Trump’s personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, is the second-most effective Twitter account of any world leader, with an average of 13,094 retweets per tweet. Pope Francis is in third place, with 10,337 average retweets per tweet.

President Trump’s unorthodox use of Twitter during the U.S. presidential election campaign, and especially since taking office, has left many governments around the world wondering if – and how – they should engage with @realDonaldTrump on Twitter. Some leaders, such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Pope Francis, have sub-tweeted President Trump without directly mentioning him by name. Only three world leaders have addressed @realDonaldTrump directly on Twitter to rebuke his policies, including Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto; Hilda Heine, the President of the Marshall Islands; and Ricardo Rosselló, the Governor of Puerto Rico.

The 2017 edition of Twiplomacy also examines the use of other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope, and the Twiplomacy.com website includes rankings as well as a social media atlas for each country studied. The study found, for example, the number of governments using Periscope has doubled over the past year, offering a cost-effective way to broadcast press conferences live.

“Politics and diplomacy are playing out on social media in a way we have never seen before,” said Don Baer, Worldwide Chair and CEO, Burson-Marsteller. “With the U.S. president bypassing traditional government channels to communicate directly to his supporters and detractors alike, we can expect more people in positions of power to adopt this practice. Our Twiplomacy study shows how fast-paced and dynamic our communications landscape truly is.”

“The study demonstrates the intense evolution in how world leaders and governments are using social media to reach policy or political objectives,” added Ramiro Prudencio, CEO of Burson-Marsteller Europe, Middle East and Africa. “This cross-platform analysis provides key insights on social media use in a global, fast-paced, connected, 24/7 information environment.”

The 2017 Twiplomacy study analysed 856 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government, and foreign ministers, in 178 countries with a combined total audience of 356 million followers. Foreign ministries tend to use Twitter to establish mutual relations. The European Union (EU) External Action Service is the best-connected foreign office, mutually connected to 128 peers. Russia’s Foreign Ministry is in second position, maintaining mutual Twitter relations with 127 other world leaders. The German Foreign Ministry has 116 mutual connections with peers, followed by the UK Foreign Office and the Foreign Ministry of Norway with 115 and 109 mutual connections, respectively.

The Donald Trump @WhiteHouse account does not follow any other foreign leader. The archived @ObamaWhiteHouse account, conversely, follows the UK government account, @Number10gov, and the Russian Prime Minister’s account, @MedvedevRussiaE.

The most followed non-government account is the United Nations Twitter account, @UN, which is followed by 338 of the 856 world leaders’ Twitter accounts; @BarackObama and the @ObamaWhiteHouse are followed by 312 and 254 world leaders, respectively. @UNICEF is the second-most followed international organisation and The New York Times (@NYTimes) is the most followed news organisation. The @Twiplomacy Twitter account is the eighth-most followed non-governmental account by world leaders, with a following of 184 heads of state and government, ahead of @Reuters and @TheEconomist.

“Twitter facilitates relations between world leaders in today’s online world,” said Matthias Lüfkens, Managing Director, Digital, at Burson-Marsteller EMEA. “I am especially honoured to see our @Twiplomacy Twitter account among the most followed accounts by heads of state and government.”

Other key findings include:

  • Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is Latin America’s most followed leader. @EPN has 6.3 million followers, far ahead of Colombia’s President @JuanManSantos, Argentina’s @MauricioMacri, and Venezuela’s @NicolasMaduro, each of whom have more than 3 million followers.
  • Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta, @UKenyatta, is Sub-Saharan Africa’s most followed leader with 2 million followers, ahead of Rwanda’s @PaulKagame and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari (@MBuhari), both of whom have more than 1 million followers.
  • The UK Prime Minister, @Number10gov, is the most followed EU leader, with more than 5.1 million followers, ahead of the British @RoyalFamily and France’s @Elysee Palace, with 2.9 and 1.5 million followers, respectively. Newly elected French President @EmmanuelMacron has shot into fifth place behind Spanish Prime Minister @MarianoRajoy, both with more than 1 million followers.
  • Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, @HHShkMohd, is the most followed Arab leader with 7.9 million, followed by Jordan’s @QueenRania and Saudi Arabia’s @KingSalman with 6.5 million followers each.
  • India’s Foreign Minister, @SushmaSwaraj, is the most followed female world leader with 8 million followers, ahead of Jordan’s @QueenRania.
  • Abdullah Bin Zayed, @ABZayed, the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates, is the second-most followed foreign minister with 3.9 million followers, with Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, @AdelAljubeir, in third place with 1.3 million followers.
  • Among the foreign ministries, the U.S. State Department (@StateDept) is the most followed, with 4.3 million, ahead of the Turkish Foreign Ministry (@TC_Disisleri) and India’s @IndianDiplomacy, with more than 1.2 million followers each.
  • More than 4,100 embassies and 1,100 ambassadors are currently active on Twitter.

The complete collection of social media studies can be found on bm.com and twiplomacy.com.

 

 

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Twitter may have beat Wall Street this time — but one tech executive says advertisers are still frustrated

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  • “It’s a pretty interesting, and tough and brutal game for anybody who’s not Facebook and not Google,” tech exec Scott McNealy says.
  • He says only a minute fraction of netizens click on ads, and many of them do it accidentally.

Wall Street rejoiced Wednesday about Twitter‘s better-than-expected earnings, sending its shares up sharply.

But online advertising has yet to see a “real breakthrough” that allows any other players to really compete with Facebook and Google, said Scott McNealy, former chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems.

“It’s a pretty interesting, and tough and brutal game for anybody who’s not Facebook and not Google,” McNealy told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “They’re owning so much of the digital advertising space. And the space hasn’t really evolved as well, I think, as people wish it had.”

McNealy is now chairman and CEO Wayin, a digital marketing platform. When AT&T debuted the first online banner ad in 1994, it seemed promising, McNealy said. But he said that today, a minute fraction of netizens click on ads, and many of them do it accidentally.

“It’s kind of a black box, and advertisers I talk to — the big brands — are very frustrated that they don’t really know how many clicks they are getting,” McNealy said. “They’re not getting the data back.”

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square.

Rebecca Cook | Reuters
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square.

Twitter reported earnings of 11 cents per share on revenue of $548 million, better than the penny per share on revenue of about $512 million that was expected by a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate.

Its premarket stock price was more than 9 percent higher.

But overall, Twitter’s earnings and revenue are on the decline from last year, and the company’s outlook was bleaker than analyst forecasts, as the company is “phasing out less effective ad formats.”

“You have the issues with the advertisers, where they don’t trust the content on there,” James Cakmak, internet equity research analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., told CNBC ahead of the earnings release. “Fake users, the harassment issue. If you purge users, and make it completely verified, that would solve that problem. And secondly, you should be able to charge those users.”

Twitter has ambitions to stream live video programming all the time, according to BuzzFeed News. But so far, it has been losing steam to competitors.

Snap, newly public, is growing super fast: Revenue was $404.48 million in 2016, up from $58.66 million in 2015. And Snapchat has high engagement, especially among teens. Amazon, meanwhile, has deepened its push into “over-the-top” video content, announcing this month an exclusive partnership to livestream “Thursday Night Football.” Last year, that deal belonged to Twitter.

“Targeting was supposed to be the holy grail, but all we’re doing really is doing the same kind of advertising you see on TV: 20, 40, 60-second spots,” McNealy said. “That really hasn’t changed the game.”

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has made big acquisitions and expansive plans. Twitter, meanwhile, has seen a shake-up, with many top-level executives departing, leaving Anthony Noto as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. CEO Jack Dorsey is also at the helm of Square.

Cakmak said Twitter’s ad team may be too focused on winning TV advertising dollars.

“With a brand ad, it’s all about trying to get to a mass market,” Cakmak said. “[Twitter’s] ads and their team are mismatched with the skillset and the niche-ness of the model, which should be more direct response, highly tailored.”

McNealy said he’s working with Twitter on “brand experiences,” using chat bots or artificial intelligence to take ads in different directions, depending on the viewer.

“Experiences are where you can actually interact — it’s not, ‘Lean back and watch a video,'” McNealy said. “Everybody who is watching advertising today has a keyboard, a touchscreen, a speaker and a microphone. So now you can engage.”

— CNBC’s Julia Boorstin contributed to this report

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How Trump Used Twitter to Solidify his Political Brand

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

“Fake news” and “Failing NYTimes” are the two phrases Donald Trump tweeted most in his first 100 days in office, showing just how much the president used Twitter to target the media at the start of his administration, according to Temple University researchers.

Temple faculty members Bruce Hardy and Heather LaMarre and doctoral student Connor Phillips studied every new tweet from the @realDonaldTrump account between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 and his 100th day in office on April 29. Excluding retweets, Trump tweeted 491 times during this period.

While several stories quantifying the president’s Twitter use have already appeared, the Temple researchers went further by using word association techniques, density charts and other tools.

According to their findings, Trump’s tweeting in his first 100 days “translates into a deliberate and targeted war on news.”

  • Trump tweeted “fake news” 32 times in his first 100 days, topping his list of favourite phrases. “Failing NYTimes” was second at 16 times. By comparison, Trump tweeted his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” only 11 times.
  • Attacks on the media dominated Trump’s Twitter account. While Trump tweeted regularly about job creation and border security, and increased his tweets on healthcare during a push to pass new legislation in March, criticism of the media was consistently the topic he tweeted about most.
  • The correlation of words Trump used also shows how much he focused on the media. On a scale of 0 to 1, the words “failing” and “NYTimes” were highly correlated at 0.87, while the words “fake” and “news” were correlated at 0.82 and “fake” and “CNN” were correlated at 0.47.
  • Trump tweeted more positive words than negative ones, and the overall sentiment on his Twitter account was positive. The Temple researchers say this is largely because Trump tweeted the word “great” 86 times in his first 100 days. His next most frequently used positive word was “honour,” at 15 times.

So what’s the take-home for this? Be sure to be enthusiastically positive more than you complain, and you might find the same success as brand #TrumpforPresident.

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Instagram Closes Gap with YouTube Among Advertisers as Twitter Continues to Fall

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Instagram continues its surge in generating advertiser interest while Facebook remains the dominant social platform. This is according to a first quarter survey of advertising agencies conducted by Strata.

The survey also found a continued multi-quarter decline in YouTube’s lead over Instagram, bringing the two within one point of each other in advertiser interest. 54% of agencies report plans to use YouTube against 53% for Instagram. Facebook remains entrenched in first place as 95% of agencies are interested in the platform. Twitter, which historically held third place in agency interest until the second quarter of 2016, continues its slide with interest from 37% of agencies, finding itself just 10% above fifth-placed LinkedIn.

The interest in these social platforms is reflected in agency spending, as well. 93% percent of agencies are currently spending money on Facebook, with 53% planning to spend on YouTube, and 49% planning on Instagram. The current spend lagging behind agency interest could indicate increased spend in the coming quarters.

More than half of agencies now plan to spend more than 5% of their overall advertising budgets on social media, with 22% allocating between 11-25% of their budgets on social, compared to 18% in 4Q16. The increase in budget for paid social coincides with the proliferation of live streaming tools, such as Facebook Live and Snapchat Live as 42% of agencies report that clients were interested in these innovations for their campaigns.

“Though Facebook has remained the dominant player in the social media space, the gradual shifts in focus to other platforms has been interesting to watch. There’s always been a premium on live, so it’s not surprising that agencies have an interest in exploring Facebook Live, Snapchat’s Spectacles, and Instagram’s Stories,” said Judd Rubin, senior vice president at Strata.

When agencies were asked which form of media they prioritised the most, 24% reported that digital video was their primary focus. Although that leaves digital video in second, behind local TV and cable at 36%, the interest in digital video has seen a 351% increase over the past year.

The rise in interest in digital video may be surprising in light of the fact that agencies appear split on the effectiveness of digital video. Twenty-five percent feel that it can be as effective as traditional TV, but 33% feel it isn’t, and 42% are unsure. When asked more broadly about perceived ROI from digital video, over 50% felt fairly confident that they were getting good value for their money. Forty-one percent noted they were unsure, and only 9% of agencies felt they were not getting a strong ROI.

 

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Twitter Considers New Revenue Streams

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In another bid to boost its bottom line, Twitter is pondering a premium Tweetdeck-like service for professionals willing to pay for social insights.

“We’re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement in March. If and when Twitter launches such a service, it will likely feature social-activity tracking and planning tools similar to those offered by SocialFlow and HootSuite.

In the past, Twitter has played with the concept of a more structured measurement service. Last summer, it debuted a Dashboard app for businesses, which could track discussion about products and keywords, as well as hashtags that failed to show up as “@” mentions.

Without much explanation, however, Twitter said it was shuttering Dashboard at the beginning of 2017.

As its business outlook dims, Twitter is obviously in search of new revenue streams. For the first time, for instance, the social giant recently announced plans to host its own presentation during the Digital Content Newfronts. Along with other platforms and publishers, Twitter plans to vie for a piece of brands’ annual ad budgets, on May 1.

The move is part of a broader effort to invest in original video content and bring advertisers into the fold, Matthew Derella, Twitter’s vice president of global revenue and operations, said earlier this month.

In the fourth quarter, Twitter saw revenue increase by just 1% to $717 million year-over-year, while monthly active users were up just 4% to 319 million.

Worse yet, ad revenue totaled $638 million — down slightly year-over-year.

Analysts did not hide their disappointment with the once high-flying company.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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34 Stats to Help You Plan Your Social Media Strategy on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & More

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By Ilya Pestov.

Back in October, I wrote a piece on Medium that covered the numbers behind some of today’s top social media networks.

From usage numbers to engagement statistics, it was incredible to see just how impactful networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become. For example, not only is Facebook home to 1.23 billion daily active users on average, but those users come from all over the world — with 85.2% residing outside of the U.S. and Canada. That’s a crazy level of connectivity.

As I put together the post, it became obvious just how fast these networks were growing — and I thought a lot about how hard is it to keep up with all of these changes, especially for marketers. To make things a little easier to wrap your head around, I put together a simplified list of some standout statistics for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instragram, and Pinterest. Check them out below if you’re looking for some guidance for your social media strategy this year.

34 Stats to Help You Plan Your Social Media Strategy on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & More

Facebook

Twitter

  • Tweets with images receive 18% more clickthroughs, 89% more Likes, and 150% more retweets.
  • 60% of consumers expect brands to respond to their query within the hour, but the average is 1 hour 24 minutes.
  • Ideal tweet length: 100 characters.
  • Clickthrough rate is highest on Wednesdays.
  • Tweet that doesn’t include a # or @ mention will generate 23% more clicks. When the tweet is focused on driving an app install, for going a # or @ mention increases clicks by 11%. But according to Quicksprout, tweets with hashtags get 2X more engagement — clicks, retweets, favorites, and replies.

LinkedIn

Instagram

  • On average, people miss 70% of their feeds.
  • 1.1% average engagement rate of all posts (4.2% in 2014; 2.2% in 2015).
  • Images with a single dominant color generate 17% more Likes than images with multiple dominant colors. Images with a high amount of negative space generate 29% more Likes than those with minimal negative space. Images featuring blue as the dominant color generate 24% more Likes than images that are predominantly red.
  • Photos showing faces get 38% more Likes than photos not showing faces.
  • Photos see more engagement than videos on Instagram.
  • The red heart is the most frequently shared emoji on Instagram, which is shared 79% more than the next most popular symbol, a smiling face with heart eyes.
  • 50% of captions and comments on Instagram contain at least one emoji.
  • The most common posting frequency for brands on Instagram is 11–20 times per month.
  • Instagram audiences are more engaged on Mondays and Thursdays at 2 a.m., 8–9 a.m., and 5 p.m.

Pinterest

By Ilya Pestov

Sourced from HubSpot

 

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