27 Oct Twitter Gets Creative Ahead of IPO | Social You Should Know
Twitter isn’t sitting still as it gets ready for the public offering. Much of this week’s social news was dominated by that network, so let’s jump in.
The Meaning of DM is Changing Quickly
Two pieces of news this week involving Twitter and its direct messages. One is an experiment Twitter is conducting with so-called “Private Feeds.” If you follow the account @MagicRecs, you’ll get direct messages with suggested accounts to follow and suggested tweets you may want to see. Similarly, @eventparrot will DM you breaking news. This is a clear future monetization opportunity. Separately, Twitter has added a new feature (that users can choose to turn on) that allows any of their followers to direct message them. Who would do this? Journalists for one, and it is certainly an option for brands with customer-service focused Twitter accounts.
Geo-Targeted Tweets and Twitter War
You can now geo-target tweets by country, a potentially exciting new feature for brands that want to consolidate multiple country accounts and/or share offers and news with only certain countries. The catch, the functionality is available only to partners with access to Twitter’s Ads API. In other words, you need a tool to do so. To the extent a higher percentage of tweets become relevant to users, that’s good for everybody. In what may soon be a standard part of the marketing toolbox, Apple competitors bought Promoted Tweets to try to take the Air (pun intended) out of the new iPad announcement. Microsoft, Samsung and LG all had tweets trying to take some of Apple’s thunder.
Quick News on Instagram, Facebook and Google
In non-Twitter news this week, we have these three items. 1) 40% of the top videos on Instagram are from brands, so there’s good potential for marketers being demonstrated. 2) Custom Audiences, Facebook’s ad targeting program that used to be available to only big spenders, is now available to all, and 3) Google and Facebook are working together to allow people who use Double Click Bid Manager to buy inventory on the Facebook Exchange. It’s not every week you see two combatants working together like that.
