Blog Post By: Emily Martin, Marketing Intern
In past couple weeks, there have been many changes made to the second largest social media site, Twitter. In a push to make the company more appealing to investors before releasing public stock for the first time this November, Twitter has launched a new feed design and announced a $350 million deal with a major third party mobile ad server. So what do all these changes mean for Twitter’s 230 million users, advertisers, and future investors?
First, for users it means that you can better share your pictures and videos through the new feed design because your followers no longer have to click a link and wait until the image or video loads. The new feed also makes having a conversation easier as Twitter uses a blue line to connect tweets. I personally am not a fan of the blue line. I think it looks really awkward in my feed, and it’s encouraging people I follow to have conversations with one another. Typically, I don’t like when people I follow have a conversation on Twitter because it blows up my feed with a conversation I don’t care about (unless it’s a celebrity battle–because who doesn’t like to watch those go down on social media). In my opinion, people should have conversations through texts and use Twitter for random thoughts, pictures, and videos.
Anyways, for advertisers, the new feed design means that ads can be “sponsored” right into user’s feed without requiring them to click on a link to see an ad. For example, if I followed Sprint or Sprint sponsored this tweet, this ad would be placed right onto my feed without requiring me to click on the link or do anything. This is awesome for advertisers trying to hit the mobile users, as most users don’t waste their time clicking on an ad.
Another way Twitter is making their social media more appealing to advertisers is through their new deal with MoPub. Twitter decided to make the deal with MoPub because they were concerned about solely gaining revenue from flooding users feed with advertisements. Now Twitter can sell the users’ data rather than selling their users’ feed space. Twitter can now track what users are tweeting about and whom they follow. Then when a user is using their mobile device to search the web or use an app (with MoPub advertising) Twitter gives that information to MoPub to better target ads for a specific user. For example, let’s say I’m following Papa Johns, and I tweet, “I really wish I had pizza right now!” If I then went to play a game on my phone (with MoPub advertising), Papa Johns could target me with advertising through this game. This new agreement puts Twitter in the game against Facebook advertising since Facebook has yet to make a deal with a third party mobile ad server.
For investors, Twitter’s new changes are intended to make the Twitter IPO look that much more profitable. The IPO will be released at a price range of $17 to $21 per share. The IPO is aimed to raise $1.6 billion for Twitter. There is much debate whether Twitter’s IPO will be successful after many investors watched Facebook’s IPO rollercoaster.
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