The Case for Twitter
Twitter has had a bad year (or two), and this week it hasn’t gotten any better. The company reported its first-ever drop in ad revenue year-over-year, and user growth continues to be slow, if not, flat. Beyond that, it’s been working to combat trolls which have dogged the platform for years. Now, it finally seems to be rolling out some features that could help keep the trolls at bay for good, but it may be too little too late.
Every time Twitter’s earnings reports come around, I brace myself for what is probably going to be bad news (I’m just a fan, not an investor). The challenge with being a public company is you have to have a product that everyone can embrace, and Twitter just isn’t that. Not everything you put out into the world on Twitter gets a reaction (unlike Facebook), and much of the conversation on the platform isn’t especially fun. It’s news. It’s political. It’s what people around the world are interested in discussing, and that isn’t always fun. All of this means Twitter isn’t for everyone, but for those who do use the platform, there’s nothing else like it.
I am rooting for Twitter. The discovery the platform enables in unparalleled from a user perspective, but even more importantly, I’m rooting for it as a marketer because of its power to reach and learn from consumers in unique and unexpected ways.
Reach based on conversation, not behavior. There’s no shortage of ways to reach consumers based on sites they visit and actions they’ve taken. Twitter is uniquely positioned because advertisers can target people by the things they talk about. It’s one thing to use a site visit as a signal for interest, but it’s something entirely different if someone is actually talking about a brand or something related to it. That is another level of contextual relevance.
Conversations that lead to insights. Twitter is one of the most open places people discuss topics online, and those conversations can lead to powerful insights in terms of what people are doing with and thinking about a category, a brand or that brand’s competitors. Twitter is a data trove full of unfiltered conversations waiting to be mined for insights. If you want an unsolicited opinion that is raw, chances are you’ll find it on Twitter, and in turn, you’ll understand your consumer at a deeper level.
Twitter’s not just Twitter. Google indexes Tweets, which can show up in Google search results, meaning if your brand is tweeting about something people are searching on, there’s a chance it could show up outside of Twitter (and on Google for that matter). Finding relevant topics and discussing them on Twitter not only exposes one’s brand to new audiences (when it makes sense), it also opens the brand up for the potential to be discovered outside of Twitter.
There’s only one Twitter, and it’s on the ropes. It offers features marketers would be hard pressed to find elsewhere. Twitter’s currently working to focus its efforts on fewer things and doubling down on its strengths, which it has. The question is whether or not it can capitalize on them.