What Twitter Needs to Stay Cool

We’ve all came to know and used Twitter, the microblogging platform with a 140-character limit, to broadcast our text messages to friends across the Web. Simple, elegant and some say, a very sweet way to share useful piece of information, photos and videos. That’s the promise of Twitter when it broke as a novelty media six years ago. But now, it’s one of the most mainstream media sites used by not only the most powerful person in the world, @BarackObama, other prominent personalities, celebrities, and brands are using the site, suggesting its roaring success in becoming a part of our collective cultural consciousness. As new and more promising social media channels like Instagram and Snapchat emerge recently to capture the hearts of the modern netizens, Twitter must overcome the challenge to stay relevant.

As Real-time Advertising Platform From The Verge’s Tim Carmody, who wrote his impressions about the recent Twitter TV Book which holds some insightful information for TV programmers, networks, and advertisers about UK televiewers’ behaviours when watching TV shows; as well as some breadth of data, the report also gave analytics and advertising partners of the social networking site. Without really meaning to state the obivious, there’s some really big wealth of data to dig for the suckers and obviously helpful in driving Twitter for use in businesses and organizations.

Take for instance the data where 60% of the 10 million active UK Twitter users actually use the social media platform while watching television. In addition, 40% of Twitter traffic during peak time is about teevision Carmody noted that Twitter can be a promising next-generation, real-time advertising platform and companies can seize the opportunities to customize ads suited to the audience by making them more effective, engaging and efficient. Television provides the template to doing so because of its nature to give real-time media and advertising platform.

Twitter can deliver what conventional TV metrics can’t tell advertisers, he further explained. Because television is the closest thing we have to an existing real-time media and advertising platform, it provides the template. But short of eyeball tracking or (in some cases) behavior-tracking code running on devices, traditional TV metrics can’t tell advertisers what Twitter can.

How this is getting really interesting? See Carmody’s analysis below: “Here’s how advertising on Twitter is already beginning to work. Companies use data on viewers’ Twitter use to time and pair specific ad campaigns with specific programs, offering ads on both TV and Twitter. If viewers tweet about the TV ads they see (and the study shows that overwhelmingly, they do), they’re directed to promoted trends, accounts, and hashtag campaigns that further help turn interest in the ad into purchase intent. That data in turn can help advertisers match Twitter ads to viewers who don’t mention the ads, just the programs, or even television ads to viewers who don’t even go on Twitter.”

The future for Twitter as an advertising tool, added Carmody, is when the line separating the different media forms, media consumption and other products becomes increasingly blurred. It’s inevitable when all you are seeing is the circle of continually updated data, multiple media formats, and user behavior. Twitter will still evolve and transform to something we never imagined it will become for the rest of the broader segment of the demographics in the future Where to, Twitter? Just last week, we’ve posted here about an informal and formal survey about how teens use today’s more popular social media tools revealed that Facebook, with 54%, is no longer the social media choice among teens and adults because that position is now taken by Tumblr with 59%. Twitter came third only with 22%.

Among 13-18 years old teens, the fastest growing social media platforms to emerge recently is the less-than-a-year Snapchat and the photo-filtering site Instagram. Then over the weekend Twitter issued that it now has more than 200 million monthly unique users, which  means 60 millions tweeps joined the Twitterverse in the last nine months. Compared to last year, Twitter said in March last year that its 140 million users were sending over 340 million tweets per day or a billion tweets every three days.

In average, Twitter really has about 6.6 million new users each month, which is still 15 years behind  if it were to aspire to achieve Facebook’s 1 billion user mark at its current pace. More about how far Twitter is faring recently, here’s one study which we’ve posted earlier about the way teeners use some of the more popular social media sites, where it came third only to the number one Tumblr and Facebook, which came second. Recent development that we have seen at the company include the pull out of Instagram to Twitter’s Cards service, which in effect dropped inline support on the Twitter.com site and this company’s apps. The most immediate solution was to deploy its own image editing filters to its apps by partnering with Aviary. The site has also started testing a feature that lets users to download an archive of their tweets by giving users the tools to host their own local backups of Twitter posts.