Twitter Tweaks Its Welcome Screen to Better Explain Itself

Twitter’s IPO is just around the corner — and it’s already showing signs of change.

The company quietly updated the Twitter.com homepage over the weekend, changing the visual design and welcome text that people see when first encountering the service.

Seen above, the new design is subtle, and focuses on two major points: Mobile, and just exactly what newcomers to Twitter should expect.

The mobile point is pretty straightforward: Twitter considers itself suited to mobile above other platforms, a strength for any Internet company in a time where audiences are moving en masse to phones from desktops.

But the language changes, while minor, are important. Look at the old welcome screen below:

It’s an attractive graphic, with a nice-enough text intro that speaks to Twitter’s immediacy. (“Find out what’s happening right now,” it says.) But the new copy actually explains how the company expects us to use Twitter: To start conversations, be they with friends and people you know, or with celebrities and national figures.

It’s the whole reason Twitter introduced its conversations design changes in August, and why it plans on a forthcoming larger redesign to make the entire service easier for the masses to use.

A minor update, to be sure. But no change is without its reasons.

By: Unknown On 8:57 AM

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Carrot Flop: Twitter CEO Costolo Finds Lack of Woman on Board Is No Joking Matter

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the lack of women on the board of Twitter, just as the San Francisco microblogging company prepared to unveil its IPO documents.

In the post, I noted that “the lack of a female director on its board even caused one board member to make a naughty joke that has been widely repeated inside the company — and forgive me in advance for this — that Twitter’s governing body has to expand beyond ‘three Peters and a Dick.’”

That quip referred to four of the members of the all-white, all-male board: Former Netscape CFO and well-known investor Peter Currie; former News Corp COO and successful Hollywood mogul Peter Chernin; under-the-radar Silicon Valley power VC Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital; and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Yesterday, Costolo tried to make another funny on the subject that only ended up casting light on the glaring issue even more. Responding to a critic of the board makeup — Stanford University’s voluble Vivek Wadhwa — the longtime tech exec tweeted that Wadhwa is the “Carrot Top of academic sources.”

That would be the not-so-funny comic — and a very low blow!

Wadhwa — a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, who is currently writing a book on women in tech — was quoted in a New York Times piece about the lack of a female board member at Twitter: “This is the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia. It’s the same male chauvinistic thinking. The fact that they went to the I.P.O. without a single woman on the board, how dare they?”

As you might imagine, the snarky tweet by Costolo — who has done a lot of improv comedy himself — was not well received by many on Twitter, although he and Wadhwa had several exchanges that were more civil.

Slightly.

It was an interesting back-and-forth, for sure, which is likely to put more pressure on the Twitter board to add a woman sooner than later. Among the many reasons that it might be a good idea? Numerous studies show that more women use Twitter than men.

To be clear, correcting the massive gender imbalance in corporate governance is something more companies in tech — Twitter is hardly an outlier here — certainly need to consider.

As I wrote more than two years ago, many private Web 2.0 companies have few women board members, unlike a number of public tech companies.

While slow in adding them, the boards of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn and eBay now include at least one woman.

Sources at Twitter, as I previously wrote, said the company has placed a top priority on adding a woman to the current all-male roster, as well as hiring a search firm to gin up names of candidates.

That list was topped by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a pretty big reach, who has not been contacted by Twitter as yet. Among those who did engage with the company, said sources: Former NBC Universal exec Lauren Zalaznick and former MTV Networks chief Judith McGrath.

By: Unknown On 12:07 AM

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One Big Doubt Hanging Over Twitter’s IPO: Fake Accounts

At 4:45 p.m. on Thursday, the Twitter account for Mashable—one of the earliest movers into the now endless world of social media news sites—sent out its 60th tweet for the day.

The tweet itself wasn’t particularly interesting, but what happened next was a small window into one of the biggest challenges Twitter will face as it seeks to convince investors that its more than 215 million users are one of the web’s most lucrative—and undeveloped—advertising audiences.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

By: Unknown On 9:37 AM

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Vivian Schiller Is Lead Candidate for Twitter’s Head of News Position

According to sources close to the situation, NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller is currently the leading choice for Twitter’s Head of News position, which the company hopes to name soon.

As AllThingsD previously reported, Twitter has been looking for an experienced newsperson to lead the company’s efforts in the news media space since earlier this year. That person would report to Twitter’s head of media Chloe Sladden, who also oversees Twitter’s TV, sports, music and politics verticals.

With the eventual appointment, Twitter aims to both legitimize itself as a serious news distribution tool, while also courting and cooperating with other longstanding news institutions.

Twitter’s ideal candidate is a sort of “elder statesman or woman” type, a seasoned news veteran that has both been around the news room and commands respect from the industry.

Schiller fits that profile. Before her current position at NBC Digital, she held senior positions at CNN, Discovery, NPR and the New York Times.

Other candidates for the position include Jim Roberts, formerly of the New York Times and most recently Reuters, as well as Emily Bell, the director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

Spokespersons from both Twitter and NBC declined to comment.

By: Unknown On 10:50 PM

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How Twitter Is Going to Take a Billion Dollars From YouTube

by James Borow, Co-Founder and CEO, SHIFT

Twitter’s public S-1 filing revealed much-awaited metrics about the company’s revenue, monthly active users, growth rate and more. Dispersed throughout the 164-page filing are details on tweet distribution and plans for growing ad revenue through Twitter Amplify and real-time TV ad targeting. These plans and details show how Twitter could take $1 billion dollars in ad revenue from YouTube.

Yes, YouTube is the de facto video distribution provider on the Internet. More than six billion hours of video are watched each month, and its videos reach more U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 34 than any cable network. It’s because of numbers like these that more than a million advertisers are pouring dollars into pre-roll YouTube advertisements.

However, YouTube’s advertising value is derived from its massive distribution around the Web. Brands generally use YouTube as a vehicle to upload easily embeddable videos, but a brand’s YouTube channel is rarely where it invests and engages with its community in real time.

This weakness is Twitter’s opportunity: Tweets are just as easily embeddable as YouTube videos, with news stories and blogs regularly including embedded tweets of reactions to recent events. Embedded tweets are slowly becoming as ubiquitous as embedded YouTube videos across the Web.

According to the filing, tweets have been embedded on more than one million third-party websites. During the second quarter of 2013, embedded tweets yielded an estimated 30 billion online impressions. A study conducted this year by Arbitron Inc. and Edison research found that almost half (44 percent) of Americans hear about tweets through media channels other than Twitter almost every day.

As a result, if Twitter continues to grow into the de facto public social network, it could easily start taking millions (and perhaps billions) of valuable ad dollars from YouTube.

In fact, Twitter is well positioned over the video distribution provider in the very place where video content is king: Television. Turn on your favorite show, and you are likely to see a hashtag or Twitter handle to extend your experience. This extension puts Twitter in an incredible spot to encourage more video content to be available on the network.

All Twitter needs to do is host long-form video, and it’s off to the races. The filing hints that this could be on the horizon: “We plan to continue to build and acquire new technologies to enable our platform partners to distribute content of all forms.”

What This Means for Ad Dollars

In a world with long-form video on Twitter, the next time a video advertiser wants to catch the attention of ABC’s “Scandal” audience, that advertiser will have a plethora of options for its ad buying, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, ABC and more. But think about the benefits that Twitter presents to an advertiser. All it needs to do is to post a tweet with the video, which will reach its followers for free, and then promote that tweet to people watching “Scandal” during its airing (which generates 2,200 tweets per minute and can be targeted via Twitter’s TV targeting). That video tweet will end up being more valuable than pre-roll on YouTube, as it’s targeting users watching “Scandal” across a variety of platforms, such as cable, Web and satellite, and it is ridiculously easy to embed across the Web. What started as a tweet to your followers ends up giving you hyper-targeting that reaches Twitter’s highly engaged audience in real time and has unlimited distribution via the rest of the Internet.

This advertising opportunity doesn’t have to be just through a traditional promoted tweet. Advertisers might eventually have the chance to run pre-roll ads on tweets as well. Just look at the co-branded video content that has been produced for Twitter’s hot new program, Twitter Amplify, which just inked a major deal with the NFL. With Twitter Amplify, a brand hosts its content on Twitter, and another brand sponsors the promotion of that content. On top of that, Twitter makes sure the content is promoted to users who might not know about the featured content to ensure greater efficiency. Twitter kicked off the program a few months ago with deals with BBC America, FOX, Fuse and even MTV, whose video tweet during the VMAs was promoted by Orbit Gum. When users hit play, they see a short still advertisement for Orbit Gum, and then the MTV video of Jimmy Fallon begins.

In addition to its one-up with television, Twitter has a big step ahead of YouTube when it comes to direct engagement. Brands successfully engage with their communities in many different ways on Twitter. Major brands have customer service monitoring Twitter 24/7. They share updates, interact with fans, comment on Super Bowl power outages and more through the social network. Each brand’s account essentially turns into the public persona for that brand on the Internet.

Although Twitter Amplify and promoted video tweets are still in their early stages, the example of the Orbit/MTV campaign is just one of many instances we’ll begin to see of advertising dollars going to Twitter that only a year ago would have gone to YouTube. The filing cited Twitter Amplify as part of its growth strategy, so we can only expect to see more use of this strategy. It’s the beginning of Twitter’s transition to a global video ad powerhouse, but it’s far more engaging than 140 characters at a time.

James Borow is the co-founder and CEO of SHIFT, a real-time marketing platform of choice for top global advertisers. SHIFT has raised $14 million to date and is backed by Lerer Ventures, Thrive Capital, Founder Collective, Rincon Venture Partners, Baroda Ventures and Crosscut Venture Partners.

By: Unknown On 10:39 PM

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Twitter Close to Picking High-Profile Head of News to Make Even Nicer With Media Types

by Kara Swisher and Mike Isaac

Twitter, which made some sort of financial news yesterday, is close to tapping a person to become its head of news, according to sources close to the search.

Sources said that the San Francisco microblogging service wants an elder statesperson type — someone who has been around the media game for quite a long time to legitimize Twitter as a news service and friendly liaison to publishing outlets.

It is not, they underlined, a move by the microblogging service to hire journalists to break news, but is more in keeping with CEO Dick Costolo’s frequent statements that Twitter is a tech company that facilitates news distribution.

While some efforts to do this at other Internet companies have failed — see: Facebook, Tumblr — only LinkedIn’s Dan Roth has had clear success at building a unique news presence on a socially-focused site.

That much splash does not seem to be Twitter’s aim, as evidenced by an advertisement the job on its Web site since May, describing the position:

You will be responsible for devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks. You should have a strong vision for the broad potential of Twitter and news, while also being able to rigorously manage and scale the news team’s daily impact.

You will be also Twitter’s representative to the News industry. You will manage Twitter’s partnerships with newsrooms in the United States as well its relationships with journalists. You will be responsible for representing Twitter at industry events.

The job selection is down to a handful of candidates, said sources, and the person chosen will report to Chloe Sladden, its head of media. She describes her job on Twitter as, “making Twitter essential to TV, music, sports, news, politics & non-profits.”

Among those that Twitter has spoken to about the news job, said sources, is former New York Times staffer Jim Roberts, who has most recently been at Reuters. He arrived there earlier this year to helm its “Next” project as executive editor of Reuters Digital. But Next was scrapped by its new CEO and, while Robert is still at Reuters, he is expected to leave soon.

Also tapped was Emily Bell, the director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and former Guardian news and media director of its digital content. But she has significant commitments in her current job, said sources, and is unlikely to take the Twitter job if offered.

A Twitter spokesman declined comment.

Courtesy: allthingsd

By: Unknown On 11:32 AM

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Twitter Is Made for Mobile, but It Still Has a Mobile Ad Gap

The move to mobile has been a problem for traditional Web publishers, who usually make less ad money from users on phones and tablets than they do from users on PCs.

And when Facebook went public last year, mobile became a glaring issue, when investors focused on the fact that Mark Zuckerberg had no mobile revenue at all.

Twitter isn’t supposed to have a mobile problem, since the company has been designed for phones from the start. Recall that in the company’s early days, it was built specifically for text messages. And last year, when Facebook was flailing at mobile, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo made a point of telling people he was making real money from phones.

But it turns out that Twitter still has a mobile gap, just like everyone else: When people use Twitter on their phones, they generate less money for the company.

Twitter doesn’t spell out the size of its mobile gap, but it does talk about it in its S-1 document, filed yesterday. The big problem: Two of the Twitter’s primary ad products — “Promoted Accounts” and “Promoted Trends” — don’t work very well on mobile phones because it’s hard for people to see them.

So that means that Twitter has “generated higher advertising revenue per timeline view on our desktop applications than on our mobile applications,” the company said.

And because 65 percent of Twitter usage happens on mobile, and because that number is likely to increase, the problem could become more acute: “To the extent that user engagement on mobile applications continues to increase faster than user engagement on our desktop applications, advertising revenue per timeline view may be adversely impacted even if total advertising revenue continues to increase.”

The fact that Promoted Trends aren’t very useful on phones may be particularly problematic for Twitter, since those ads have been selling well, in part because they resemble traditional display ads that marketers are familiar with. Earlier this year, the company was selling individual Trend ads, which appear on the side of a desktop users’ timeline, for upwards of $200,000 a day.

Twitter may be able to address some of this via new ad products that work better on phones. And changes to Twitter itself may help.

As my colleague Mike Isaac has reported, an upcoming makeover for Twitter’s iPhone software will put more focus on images and video, which could have obvious ad implications. If Twitter can figure out how to make its mobile “discover” section more usable, that would also help, since that’s where the company currently stashes Promoted Trend and Account ads.

But some parts of the mobile problem will be beyond Twitter’s control. The majority of the company’s user base — 77 percent in Q2 2013 — is outside the U.S. And in some of those markets, users can’t get access to Twitter goodies like video, because they’re on slow Web connections or crude phones or both.

That’s presumably one of the reasons Twitter’s international users only account for 25 percent of the company’s revenue, and why “advertising per timeline view” — Twitter’s new version of an ad metric — generates $2.17 in the U.S. and 30 cents everywhere else in the world.

Courtesy: allthingsd

By: Unknown On 11:16 AM

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File Under #Finally: Twitter Unveils $1 Billion IPO, Showing Growing Revenue but No Profits

Not even a government shutdown could stop Twitter from its appointed IPO.

Today, the social microblogging company that started out its life as another product altogether unveiled its S-1 documents for its public offering of $1 billion. Its symbol will be TWTR, but Twitter did not say where its stock would be traded.

In its filing, the company went very cute, with an image of its first tweet by co-founder and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, noting, “Twitter was born on March 21, 2006 with just 24 characters.”

It also included images of tweets from everyone from President Barack Obama to Wheat Thins to the one from Clarence House announcing the new royal baby in England.

More importantly, this is the first look at the business of the privately held San Francisco-based Twitter. Revenue for 2012 was $316.9 million. For the first half of 2013, $253.6 million.

The company lost $79.4 million in 2012 and lost $69.3 million in the first half of 2013.

But, on an adjusted basis, Twitter noted in its filing:

“From 2011 to 2012, revenue increased by 198% to $316.9 million, net loss decreased by 38% to $79.4 million and Adjusted EBITDA increased by 149% to $21.2 million. From the six months ended June 30, 2012 to the six months ended June 30, 2013, revenue increased by 107% to $253.6 million, net loss increased by 41% to $69.3 million and Adjusted EBITDA increased by $20.7 million to $21.4 million.”

In other words, it is slowly making money, at least from a cash flow perspective.

Expectations of revenue were pegged at just about $600 million this year and close to $300 million last year.

In the filing, Twitter said it had 215 million active users, or those that use the service at least once a month, sending out 500 million tweets daily. It said in December that it had 200 million.

As of midyear, Twitter said it had $164.4 million in cash or cash equivalents.

As to the big owners of Twitter, pre-IPO: CEO Dick Costolo with 7.6 million shares, co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey with 23.4 million shares, co-founder and former CEO and director Evan Williams with 56.9 million shares. Director Peter Fenton held 31.6 million shares for Benchmark Capital.

The other big holders, called “5% Stockholders,” include, as I had previously reported: Rizvi Traverse, Spark Capital, Benchmark, Union Square Partners and DST Global.

Shares are expected to trade starting in November, which it can do after a 21-day period after the public filing. But it could also delay that, especially if markets suffer due to the recent government shutdown.

Twitter is far along in the IPO process, having filed financial information with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July. It has since been going back and forth with regulators on issues, confidentially, part of a filing process for companies with revenue of less than $1 billion under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act.

It released news of the filing in September via — of course — a tweet.

Twitter will now go on a public road show for investors, although it has been in talks with a number of them already as part of the process.

Here are the bankers, for those who care about such things (only the bankers): Goldman Sachs in the lead, with Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, as well as smaller players, Allen & Co. and Code Advisors.

And, in its short letter to potential shareholders from @twitter, the company said:

We started with a simple idea: share what you’re doing, 140 characters at a time. People took that idea and strengthened it by using @names to have public conversations, #hashtags to organize movements, and Retweets to spread news around the world. Twitter represents a service shaped by the people, for the people.

The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve–and do not detract from–a free and global conversation.

Thank you for supporting us through your Tweets, your business, and now, your potential ownership of this service we continue to build with you.

Yours,

@twitter

Courtesy: allthingsd

By: Unknown On 12:02 AM

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Twitter announces its $1 billion initial public offering

The company will trade under the ticker name TWTR. 

by Megan Geuss

Twitter filed an S-1 form with the Security and Exchange Commission on Thursday, officially providing more details about its intent to take itself public, offering up 472,613,753 shares of stock in order to raise $1 billion.

The initial public offering marks the first time that Twitter has been required to make much of its financial data public, and it shows a company that is growing its revenue but still hasn't quite turned a profit.

The SEC filing says that Twitter has 218 million monthly active users, up from 200 million in December 2012. The company also says it has seen a 198 percent growth in year-over-year revenue, bringing in $316.9 million in 2012, and a 38 percent decrease in net loss to $79.4 million. For the first half of 2013, the company brought in $253.6 million in revenue and its net loss was tallied at $69.3 million.

AllThingsD reminds us that expectations for Twitter's revenues “were pegged at just about $600 million this year and close to $300 million last year.”

So Twitter's IPO will be small, at least compared to Facebook's recent IPO, in which the company said it expected to raise $13 billion on 337,415,352 shares of stock. But Facebook's shares stumbled quite a bit when the company finally got out on the track, with some investors claiming that the company had been overvalued. It has only relatively recently found its footing.

In the company's "Risk Factors" section, Twitter says that going forward, its profitability is dependent on growing its user base.

"To the extent our user growth rate slows, our success will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement and ad engagement on Twitter. We generate a substantial majority of our revenue based upon engagement by our users with the ads that we display," the company wrote in its S-1.

TWTR shares are expected to begin trading in November.

Courtesy: arstechnica

By: Unknown On 9:35 PM

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Former Twitter Product Lead Mitali Pattnaik Joins Foundation Capital as EIR

Foundation Capital announced on Tuesday that Mitali Pattnaik, a former Twitter product manager, will join as the venture firm’s newest entrepreneur in residence.

Pattnaik’s work will focus on the two areas she is most interested in: The education sector (a space that’s top of mind to Pattnaik, who came to the U.S. years ago to go to college) and what’s often referred to as the “collaborative consumption” space, made popular by companies like Airbnb, Uber and others.

“A lot of the traditional value chains of these industries are being disintermediated so that the consumer can be directly connected to the platform,” Pattnaik said in an interview. “This is going to happen across many other industries.”

Previous to her new position, Pattnaik spent the better part of two years at Twitter, where she worked on the company’s revenue team and was responsible for the overall social commerce strategy. Prior to Twitter, Pattnaik worked for Google on its commerce initiatives, including Google Offers, was a social games director of product management at Electronic Arts, and held various product roles at Yahoo and Microsoft.

READ MORE: Grand Theft Auto Online launches to widespread server issues

Pattnaik joins former Twitter colleague Anamitra Banerji, a partner at the firm who signed on earlier this year, as well as five other current entrepreneurs in residence. Foundation also added Adit Singh of Comcast Ventures and Jonathan Ehrlich of Facebook in 2013.

Courtesy: allthingsd

By: Unknown On 9:35 AM

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In Race With Twitter, Facebook, Like, Fluffs Its Social TV Numbers

On the same day that Twitter and Nielsen are debuting their first TV Ratings report emerging from the two companies’ partnership, Facebook is slyly releasing official numbers designed to give its own TV efforts a boost.

Facebook claims that AMC’s hot “Breaking Bad” finale was a hit across its social network, generating more than 5.5 million interactions from 3 million+ users. Twitter, meanwhile, saw 1.47 million tweets in comparison from 682,000+ uniques for the same show. What does this mean for Twitter, whose forthcoming IPO is heavily dependent on its TV partnerships and ad business? Is Facebook moving in for the kill?

Well, maybe. But Facebook’s numbers feel a little fudged here.

For background, Facebook announced that it will begin sending out weekly TV reports to the U.S.’s top four networks this week – a move that was not coincidentally disclosed just ahead of the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating report’s launch. Facebook says it will send data to ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS as well as a few other select partners, in order to demonstrate to what extent social conversations around TV programs are now taking place on its own network.

For example, Facebook found that ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” generated over a million interactions across 750,000 users on its network. Previously, reports had stated that Facebook seesfive times as much TV-related activity on its network than on Twitter. But as TechCrunch’s Josh Constine said before, that’s not a fair comparison.

A LIKE IS NOT EQUAL TO A TWEET 

To state the obvious, Facebook is much bigger than Twitter: 1.15 billion monthly actives versusTwitter’s 200+ million. One could argue its numbers for almost anything will be bigger. But really, it’s Facebook’s looser definition of active engagement that makes comparing its figures to Twitter’s a problem. Facebook, you see, counts nearly any engagement with its content among its “interactions” – it includes not only those posting status updates themselves, but also others who then like, comment or re-share that post to their own networks of friends.

Facebook counting a “like” as an “interaction” is like Twitter counting a “favorite.” It’s not an ideal metric to lump in with Facebook posts or re-shares, but, rather, should be treated as a separate category of interaction.

After all, there are a number of reasons why you may like someone’s Facebook status, and it’s not always directly related to the TV content they’ve shared. You might like a post because your friend also cracked a funny joke of some sort along with their note about the show they’re watching, but that doesn’t mean you’re also a viewer or a fan. Or the post might contain more information beyond the TV show identified through basic keyword matching, and it’s the other part of the post that you’re actually “liking.”

Many social networks like to fluff their numbers when it serves a purpose. Google reports steady increases in Google+ growth, for example, making it sound like Google+ (the destination website) is a bigger player in social than it really is. In reality, Google+ numbers are growing because Google+ is being baked in as the social layer across Google products ranging from Gmail to, most recently,YouTube comments.

FACEBOOK’S SOCIAL TV DATA COULD BECOME BETTER IN TIME 

At launch, Facebook’s TV reports are not on par with Twitter’s. It will not include other data like how many people saw activity where a TV show is being discussed – something Twitter and Nielsen’s TV Rating report is already doing. And tracking this metric will be more difficult on Facebook, because its filtered News Feed doesn’t show users every post from friends.

There are also hints that Facebook has had to work quickly to overcome potentially bad data here, indicating that its move to court TV networks is more reactive than proactive in this situation. In The WSJ’s relaying of Facebook’s news, it noted that before fine-tuning its system, which relies on keywords, Facebook had problems where it reported CBS’s “NCIS” too highly because “NCIS” is a string of letters found in the more often mentioned term “San Francisco.” (To address this issue, Facebook had to create a database of characters and other keywords related to each show in order to not end up with false positives.)

That said, as Facebook ramps up its efforts in this space, its data could become more valuable in the long run because there’s more of it, and it includes profile demographics. The company has already unleashed anonymized data to select news outlets and marketers for other purposes, so there’s no reason why it couldn’t do the same for TV networks now.

TWITTER WINNING THE SECOND SCREEN FOR NOW 

Meanwhile, as Facebook gets up to speed with social TV data, Twitter is building out a business based on being the preferred “second screen” app. To serve up TV ratings and analysis, Twitter partnered with Nielsen, which owns SocialGuide, for TV ratings. It acquired companies like Bluefin Labs and Trendrr to further beef up its social TV efforts. With Twitter Amplify, it’s allowing broadcasters to embed short video clips in their tweets in near real-time. And it partnered with CBS on Amplify just this month. It’s also privately experimenting with a DVR-like functionality that would allow you to replay TV-related tweets as you watch a show after its original airing.

In addition, Twitter rolled out TV Ad Targeting programs this summer, which let U.S. advertisers target those who just saw their TV commercials while watching a given show. Twitter has a semantic understanding of what people are talking about here, too. Most importantly, being pushed the ad twice seems to work well, according to early reports. Nielsen found that the combination of TV ad and follow-up tweet delivered 95 percent stronger message association and 58 percent higher purchase intent than TV ads alone.

With all these initiatives underway, Twitter, though smaller and less diverse (the site sees a disproportionate number of young female users CBS’s chief researcher officer told The WSJ), is for now ahead of Facebook in terms of making a business out of the social TV data it has on hand.

Courtesy: techcrunch

By: Unknown On 7:10 PM

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