Throughout the second quarter of this year, we at Fetch have used Twitter as a social advertising partner more than we have in any other previous quarter to date, and, as alluded to in Twitter’s letter to shareholders, there are also some exciting new developments on its product roadmap.
The platform’s focus on increasing ROI with improved measurement and leveraging of their total audience is one of the most interesting things happening with Twitter.
It seems like their algorithms are consistently improving and the results are demonstrating this. We have seen increasingly strong performance results, combined with an ability to scale.
Of course this doesn’t mean Twitter will not continue to face stiff competition and the markets will still need to be convinced on the strength of the growth of their monthly active users, especially in the US.
Competition from other social media platforms is a constant threat for Twitter, as channels like Snapchat and Pinterest become increasingly prevalent amongst consumers and as they develop their commercial opportunities.
We have, however, seen Twitter take some important steps to improve organisation and discoverability of valuable content with the introduction of Twitter Moments and Twitter Stickers in recent months, a general shift towards "real-time" live news reporting and the functionality for advertisers to target their audience based on the emojis they tweet.
All of these features are not only a clear sign that Twitter is working hard to catch up with competitors’ product offerings at a key time of the year, but that it will also use all this additional data to revamp its ad targeting capabilities.
The growth of live video
The focus on live video content offers enormous potential and is a hot topic for many of our clients at the moment.
News that Sky Sports has partnered with Twitter to show Premier League football highlights and goals in real-time on the @SkyFootball account is a major boost to Twitter as a platform for live video.
This is one of many sports-focused content deals announced recently by Twitter, including deals to livestream Major League Baseball and National Hockey League games. This extension from shared opinions and links to the consumption of content is a slight shift of focus for Twitter, and how consumers respond to this moving forward will be really interesting to see.
Twitter still remains the leading tool for instant updates and headlines. In an election year in the US, and with the Rio Olympics just around the corner, this is a huge opportunity for them to show their true value.
Twitter’s biggest challenge of course is bringing engaged users to their platform. Great advertising only goes so far if the audience is not there to engage with it.
