I attended a great DMA Northern California presentation yesterday by Ayush Agarwal, Head of Products at CoTweet. The topic, “What’s Twitter Up to Next?” Here’s a brief recap…
In the last two years, Twitter has grown from 500,000 to 145,000,000 users. Each day there are 350,000 new signups, 80 million tweets and 14 million new followers.
According to Ayush, “if you have a business, you have to have a social presence so you can be where your audience is.” It’s important to monitor what’s being said about your company and your brand and be proactive in engaging with prospects and customers in a two-way dialog. He thinks of a company’s brand as the sum of all of the conversations about it.
Twitter has made several enhancements recently, including these new features:
PROMOTED
- “Promoted Tweets” are paid tweets mixed in with other tweets but that show up at the top of the list in search results.
- “Promoted Trends” are trending topics that have been paid for by an advertiser and are displayed without searching on a topic. For instance, my trending topics for San Francisco area include a New Selena Album that indicates it’s promoted:
Example of a Promoted Trend
- “Promoted Accounts” are paid suggestions on who to follow.
VERIFIED ACCOUNTS
- If you see “Verified” next to an account name, it means that a public figure is really who they say they are. Right now this is a closed beta program.
CONTRIBUTOR
- Contributors are employees of companies who are tweeting on the company’s behalf. Each employee has their own Twitter handle that includes their name and the company name. Ayush recommends that, if needed, Twitter users have a Twitter account for work and personal account to keep those two worlds separate.
In the “New Twitter” being rolled out gradually to all users, you’ll see “everything in one place”. For instance, you will see people who retweeted a tweet at the top of the page, and you’ll see rich media (images and video) in the right pane of your browser screen. However certain service providers will need to be used to upload photos, etc.
Thanks to Ayush for a great presentation. His company, CoTweet, owned by ExactTarget, is a Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies such as Citibank, Delta Airlines, Kelley Blue Book, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Sprint, Staples, Universal Music Group, Whole Foods and others engage, track and analyze conversations about their brands across Twitter and Facebook. Check them out at www.cotweet.com.