Twitter - The Next Level of Information Distribution

Twitter - The Next Level of Information Distribution

by Guest Poster on March 26, 2009

in Other Twitter Tips

Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) of SubHub and TalkContent takes a look at the amazing reach potential of Twitter, as a distribution mechanism.

These days ever increasing numbers of us are falling victim to information overload.

With a totally overwhelming number of sites and blogs on the web, all vying for our attention, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to both keep up and take part in ‘the conversation’.

While RSS feed readers have helped in many respects, with their ability to aggregate multiple sources and allow us to quickly assess what we want to read in more detail, there is still the inconvenience of having to find and add your own sites of interest and their corresponding feeds. There is also no means for immediate response or discussion.

Indeed those who think Twitter is about 'telling you're having breakfast' should think again. If you are a knowledge ' worker' and who isn't these days Twitter has great potential if you take it beyond the 'what are you doing' level.

Firms Seek Profit in Twitter's Chatter - WSJ.com

Firms Seek Profit in Twitter's Chatter

In the three years since its launch, the messaging service Twitter has attracted millions of users, but its fast growth hasn't translated into significant revenue.

Now, other companies are trying to profit from Twitter's popularity by experimenting with business models that incorporate parts of the free messaging service.

Twitter allows users to broadcast 140-character messages, known as "tweets," that other users can subscribe to, or "follow." Users can read the messages on Web sites, through custom Twitter-reading software and on their mobile phones.

[twitter and product ads] Glam Media

In a video module sponsored by Aveeno during the Academy Awards in February, Glam Media featured Oscar-related 'tweets.'

The service's users run the gamut from publicity-seeking celebrities to moms who want to stay abreast of their children's schedules. Some enterprising users have even found ways to earn money by tweeting product endorsements.

More recently, businesses have gotten into the act, brokering ads to appear alongside tweets filtered by topic, such as the Academy Awards, or helping brands promote themselves on Twitter.

German start-up Magpie & Friends has started paying users for the right to sell ads in their tweets. The company uses an auction system in which potential advertisers bid on keywords they want to associate with their ads -- like iPhone or NCAA.

Magpie looks for tweets about these topics among Twitter users who have signed up with it and, with permission, sends the winning bidders' ads into those users' message streams, to be seen by their followers. Advertisers typically pay from a few cents to around $13 per ad, and Magpie splits the proceeds with the user.

So far, none of the companies piggybacking on Twitter has reaped a windfall, but their strategies suggest some ways that Twitter -- which was valued at $255 million in connection with a recent round of venture funding, according to people familiar with the matter -- might go about cashing in on its growing ranks of users.

But in pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn't view them as competition. "We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort," he says.

Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn't set a launch date for them.

[twitter usage]

Twitter will get a cut of one outside business that sprang up this week, a Web site called ExecTweets. The site, launched by online advertising network Federated Media, displays tweets from business executives.

Microsoft Corp. is the sole sponsor the site, which touts the software maker's role with a "Brought to You by Microsoft" label. Federated plans to share some of the sponsorship revenue with Twitter, according to both companies. Federated says it plans to work with brand advertisers on other Twitter-related sites.

Others are trying to extract revenue from Twitter on their own. This month, Glam Media, an online-ad network and lifestyle Web site, plans to announce a new site and service that will filter and package tweets according to their themes. It intends to sell ads on these theme pages and to the share revenue with other Web sites that make its packages available on their sites, says Glam Chief Executive Samir Arora.

Glam tested the service during the Academy Awards in February. In the test, skin-care brand Aveeno, which is owned by Johnson & Johnson, sponsored a widget, or small software application, on Glam's Web site that highlighted tweets about the Oscars. Among the tweets from users: "I want to know how all those actresses stay so skinny."

Glam's Mr. Arora says the model is a new way to use news and events to make money online. "Live events have moved to the Web, but you need packaging of the content," he says. To give its packages more polish, Glam will combine the Twitter messages with other media like video.

Mashable, a blog that covers online social media, recently began soliciting brands to pay to have their tweets featured on its Web site, alongside other banner ads. JetBlue and MailChimp, which manages email marketing campaigns, signed up for the sponsorships; Mashable Chief Executive Pete Cashmore declines to disclose the price they paid. "It's kind of ironic that we're monetizing Twitter before Twitter," he says.

As Twitter's growth explodes, speculation has intensified about whether the service can be profitable. Twitter's online traffic, excluding cellphones, surged to nearly 9.8 million unique visitors in February from 6.1 million in January, according to comScore.

Fred Wilson, a Twitter investor and board member who is a partner at Union Square Ventures, says Twitter will make money by "following the money," or building on the ways that others are developing businesses based on the service.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

Twitter’s Tweet Smell Of Success

Twitter’s Tweet Smell Of Success

March 18th, 2009 Posted in Nielsen News, Online And Mobile | 18 Comments

Michelle McGiboney, Nielsen Online

Twitter.com continues to grow in popularity and importance in both the consumer and corporate worlds. No longer just a platform for friends to stay connected in real time, it has evolved into an important component of brand marketing. Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month.  Zimbio and Facebook followed, growing 240 percent and 228 percent, respectively.

Fastest Growing Member Community Destinations in February 2009

 

RANK Site Feb 08 Feb 09 % growth
1 Twitter.com 475,000 7,038,000 1382%
2 Zimbio 809,000 2,752,000 240%
3 Facebook 20,043,000 65,704,000 228%
4 Multiply 821,000 2,394,000 192%
5 Wikia 1,381,000 3,758,000 172%
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work

 

Twitter Most Popular Among Working Adults

Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the combo unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only.

 

Unique Visitors to Twitter.com by Age Demographic

 

Age Group Unique Audience Composition %
2-17 250,000 3.6
18 - 24 ** **
25 - 34 1,379,000 19.6
35 - 49 2,935,000 41.7
55+ 1,165,000 16.6
65+ 477,000 6.8
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work
**These demographics have insufficient sample sizes

 

 

 

Twitter On The Move

PC Web usage of Twitter.com doesn’t tell the whole story. The ability to twitter via a mobile phone-whether through the mobile Web or via text messages-is a driving factor in the social network’s success. In January, 735,000 unique visitors accessed the Twitter Web site through their mobile phones. The average unique visitor went to Twitter.com 14 times during the month and spent an average of seven minutes on the site.

Finally, text messaging offers a third platform for consumers and businesses alike to take part in the twitter craze. In the last quarter of 2008, 812,000 unique users sent or received Twitter text messages from AT&T or Verizon cell phones. There was an average of nearly 240 tweets per person for the quarter.

It will be interesting to watch the evolution of Twitter as it continues to gain momentum. In an unstable economy, it might prove to be an economical and important part of an employer’s marketing strategy that helps to keep consumers aware of and connected to their brand.

Follow Nielsen Wire on Twitter

 

WeFollow - New Twitter Directory From Kevin Rose

WeFollow - New Twitter Directory From Kevin Rose


WeFollow - Home Page

One of the problems with Twitter is knowing who to follow in particular areas. Now Kevin Rose has launched WeFollow, a nice directory of people organized into categories. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start and well worth visiting.

At the site, you’ll see the top five people in popular categories such as celebrity, music and news. You can also drill-down into any category to see all the people listed in them. On the right-hand side of the home page, there’s also a list of more popular categories:

WeFollow - Tags

That list of popular categories (or tags) is dynamic and has already changed since the site first launched. For example, socialmedia and marketing weren’t on it originally, but then they rose up.

What happened? The top categories are based on the total number of followers that everyone in a particular category has. For example, at the time I wrote this, the “marketing” category had 76 people who have placed themselves into that category. Those people collectively had 60,236 followers. Just above marketing was the apple category. It had 93 people who had 73,617 followers collectively. The more followers a category has collectively, the higher it comes on the list.

Adding yourself is easy. Simple send a Twitter reply to the WeFollow twitter account with the areas you’d like to be listed under, up to three of them, with each area starting with a # sign. For example, if you wanted to be listed under wine, design and awesome, you’d do it like this:

@wefollow #wine #design #awesome

Awesome is a category? Yep, it is. Anything can be a category, once someone assigns themselves to it. Of course, if you’re looking for visibility, it makes sense to find the most popular category that relates to yourself, then place yourself in it.

There are no help pages on the site, and since it’s all self-classification, there’s nothing preventing you from putting yourself in a category like “music” even if you’re not a musician. However, that doesn’t guarantee visibility. With each category, people are then listed by the number of followers they have. So for me, I currently get to be 5th in the blogs category:

WeFollow - Blog Category

In the tech category, I’m 12th:

WeFollow - Tech Category

That’s because in the techt category, there are more people with more followers than me (want to help move me up? follow @dannysullivan on Twitter!)

Some people got special treatment. @britneyspears tops the celebrity list; @coldplay tops the music list and @barackobama tops the politics list, but none of these accounts asked to be listed in WeFollow as others are having to do (I can tell this, because you can see none of them sent a reply message to WeFollow).

I’m sure some will feel that’s unfair, especially given some of these accounts also have huge numbers of followers due to being on Twitter’s suggested list. But it does make sense that some of these categories were prepopulated.

It’ll be interesting to see how the directory changes, over time. So far, there seems to be no limit on how often you can reclassify yourself. Don’t like where you put yourself initially? Just send a reply to WeFollow with new categories, and that will put you into new places.

Finally, it’s also uncertain how quickly (if at all) that WeFollow updates user counts. For example, the number of followers I have has changed since I first listed myself with WeFollow about two hours ago — but my old count is still listed on WeFollow. My assumption is that if I relisted myself, the count would update to my latest figure. That’s easy to do, but it’s annoying for followers if people constantly have to do this (though good visibility for WeFollow). Hopefully, WeFollow is smart enough to automatically do this. Alternatively, it would be nice if you could add yourself to the service and update through direct messages. All that @wefollow stuff that’s going to be happening will get annoying soon enough.

Postscript: Updating your tags does not appear to update your count, I’ve just discovered. Also noteworthy is that WeFollow has its own top Twitterers list that differs from the long-standing Twitterholic list. Both things make me more certain that WeFollow plans to run some type of automated rechecking. so that its “top” list is an attraction, as well. Also see related commentary now on Techmeme.

Meanwhile, what if you tag yourself in more than three categories, as @mattcutts tried:

@wefollow #tech #web #blogger #google #blogs #seo #geek #technology #internetmarketing #cats #gadgets

Doing this makes WeFollow ignore the request, as best I can tell. When I looked, Matt hadn’t shown up in ANY of these categories — yet when I reclassified another Twitter account into one of them AFTER his request, that account did show up.

Postscript 2: Correction — as noted below and by others who have twittered me, if you use more than three tags, only the last three are used by WeFollow.

Postscript 3 (Mar. 17): It looks as if the three tag limit is gone. @graywolf twittered seeing someone with more than three tags listed. I checked, and could see the person listed with more than three tags (if you click the “i” info button next to a person, you get more details that show all the places they’re listed in WeFollow. I then tried the same for myself, sending in more than three tags, and I showed up in all the places I indicated except the last (11 of 12, so 11 is probably the new limit). However, the Info button for me still only listed three places (which might be a bug).

Postscript 4 (Mar 19): Various people have reported that WeFollow is back to using only three tags again.


Make Sense of Confusing Twitter Hash Tags

Make Sense of Confusing Twitter Hash Tags

Adam DuVander, March 20th, 2009

TagalusDo you use Twitter, but don’t spend your March in Austin? You may be confused by “#sxsw” showing up in your stream. A new site can help make sense of the gibberish “hash tags” spouted by some of the people you follow.

SXSW hashtag on Tagalus

Hash tags are words or acronyms that begin with the number sign. They are used when many people are tweeting about the same topic, or from the same event. At least one hash tag is often atop Twitter’s trending topics list. Tagalus is a service to declare the meaning of those confusing hash tags. There can be more than one version, with users voting up the best definition.

Just send a tweet @tagalus to suggest a meaning for a tag. You can also add and view tags on its site. Even better, Tagalus has an API, which accesses both getting and setting of definitions (more at our Tagalus API profile). The usefulness of hashtags could really be increased if Tagalus is integrated into popular Twitter clients, the same way automatic URL shorteners make sharing links easier.

Tagalus isn’t alone in trying to make sense of hashtags. The granddaddy is Hashtags.org, which tracks tags by popularity over time. Before Twitter’s search feature was useful, Hashtags provided a means to search tags. Tagref, a tool similar to Tagalus is built on Twitter’s APIs (our Twitter and Twitter Search profiles).

Like Twitter itself, hashtags have multiple uses. Services like Tagalus are helping to make sense of the possibilities.

 

Track Your Packages via Twitter

Track Your Packages via Twitter

John Musser, January 30th, 2009

TwitterYou may not have realized the benefits of being able to use tweets to find out where your Amazon delivery is, but TrackThis wants to change that. It’s an app that combines more than six different APIs in order to let you track your packages over email, text message, Facebook or Twitter. It monitors your packages and when they move it sends you a message with the new location and ETA. TrackThis supports FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL and other tracking codes.

As you can see in our TrackThis profile, it’s a mashup that combines two very different classes of APIs: social APIs (Twitter, Facebook), and package shipping APIs (DHL, FedEx, UPS, and US Postal Service).

TrackThis

As they say in the tag line, it’s “Modern package tracking”.

Next time I place an order I definitely will want to track, so it should ship via one off the carriers mentioned in the article.