Tag: twitter

Twitter Won Rights To Live-Stream Ten NFL Games

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter has won digital simulcast rights for the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package for 2016, which includes the ten NFL games that will be broadcasted by NBC and CBS as well as pre-game warmup broadcasts on Periscope. Twitter will be live-streaming the games globally for free without requiring sign-in, and reportedly will be selling one-third of the ad inventory itself.

The news came after month-long rumors of front-running bidders for the NFL live-streaming rights, which included Verizon, Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook. This deal marks a continuation of Twitter’s ongoing partnership with the NFL, which started in 2013 when the social network struck a deal to publish game highlights and video clips.

What Brands Need To Do
With consumers increasingly migrating from consuming media content on TV sets to streaming on their mobile devices, it makes sense that media owners and brand advertisers are following the eyeballs. Live sports events are one of the last bastions against the ratings erosion that the TV networks have suffered from in recent years. As this and Yahoo’s similar deal with the MLB indicate, live sports viewing may soon shift toward digital and consequently eat into TV ratings. For brands, this means it is time to consider reallocating their ad spending between digital and TV. Brands with an international presence can also leverage Twitter’s global reach to get in front of a wider audience.  

To read more on how brands can reach the audiences on OTT streaming platforms, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Bloomberg

Twitter Makes Direct Message A Better Consumer Service Tool

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter is making it easier for brands to use its platform for customer service. The microblogging network has added two new features to its private messaging feature specifically for this cause. Now brands can add a new button to a tweet that opens up a Direct Message to help customers move the conversation into private messages when private information is needed, such as payment information or membership ID numbers. Moreover, a new feedback feature now prompts customers to rate their experience on a 0-to-10 scale after a chat with customer support on Twitter. Last week, Twitter also started supporting videos in Direct Messages, making it possible for brands to send instructional or promotional videos to customers when needed.

What Brands Need To Do
As more and more customers turn to social media to talk with brands, either asking for help or airing their grievances, perhaps knowing that the publicness of such interactions may guarantee faster responses, it is important for brands to be more proactive in their social customer support and properly use the new tools to handle the requests and complaints. Combined with Twitter’s new buy button, the new tools can also help brands advance their social commerce initiatives.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Twitter Rolls Out Search Tool For GIFs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Your Twitter timeline is about to get a lot more animated, thanks to Twitter’s addition of a GIF search tool. Powered by Giphy and Riffsy, the new search tool is accessible for all Twitter users via a “GIF Search” button in the tweet-composing window. The animated images will be searchable via keywords or by browsing through the reaction-based categories, such as “awww,” “applause,” or “mic drop.” GIFs will be available in Direct Messages as well.

What Brands Need To Do
The microblogging network has supported GIFs on its platform since June 2014, but adding a GIF search engine should make it much easier to find the right GIFs and therefore greatly encourage their usage.  Down the road, it is quite likely that Twitter would follow the example set by some messaging apps such as LINE and Kik and come out with branded GIFs to help brands better engage with consumers. For now, however, brands should utilize this new tool to spice up their tweets with some fun animated GIFs and grab followers’ attention.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Header image courtesy of The Official Twitter Blog

Twitter Introduces Algorithm-Powered Timeline

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Despite CEO Jack Dorsey’s denouncement of a new Twitter timeline earlier this week, Twitter has officially added the “top tweets” at the top of users’ feeds, using an algorithm based on user interest and popularity of tweets (based on retweets and favorites) to curate the tweets that users will see before the traditional reverse-chronological feed. Launching on the heels of Twitter’s debut of “First View” video ad product yesterday, the new feature is a natural extension of the “While You Were Away” feature that Twitter launched last year, which also surfaces some of the best tweets that users may have missed.

What Brands Need To Do
Although the new timeline doesn’t entails any immediate, major changes for marketers, it could help extend the organic reach of brands’ tweets. Given that brands with established Twitter presence tend to have large followings and receive a lot of retweets and like for their posts, their unpaid tweets could be more likely to appear in the top tweets feed. As the algorithm only ranks tweets based on organic engagement, any retweets or likes that a promoted tweet receives will not factor into that ranking. This means brands will have to up their game in creating engaging content in order to reach a bigger audience.

 

Source: AdAge

Twitter Introduces New Ad Product To Help Brands Stay On Top (Of Timelines)

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Twitter debuted a new video ad unit called First View, which allows brand to claim the top spot in Twitter’s ad network for 24 hours. Those who use First View will have their branded video placed in the front of the ad queue, ensuring that their video will be the first ad that users see when they open twitter.

Last week, reports suggest that Twitter is working on an algorithm-based news feed to replace the chronologically-ordered one, but CEO Jack Dorsey quickly dispelled the idea, saying that Twitter has no immediate plan to reorder the timeline. However, with the launch of First View, it seems that Twitter does want to tweak its ad placement a bit to give the top spot to brands willing to spend a little more.

What Brands Need To Do
Following its million-dollar custom emojis, Twitter serves up another premium ad product in First View, as the company continues to experiments with new ways to surge up ad revenues. For brand advertisers, First View offers them a coveted position at the top of the news feed, amplifying the reach of their branded videos. This new ad product should be especially helpful for brands launching time-sensitive campaigns, such as video ads promoting upcoming events and movie premieres.

 

Source: AdWeek

Two Brands Go For Twitter’s Million-Dollar Branded Emojis For Super Bowl

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch are among the latest brands to get their own branded emojis on Twitter, just in time for their Super Bowl campaigns this Sunday. Pepsi created an emoji of a Pepsi can surrounded by music notes to accompany the #PepsiHalftime hashtag, whereas Anheuser-Busch created two emojis for Budweiser and Bud Light to liven up their respective Twitter campaigns. Sources say that Twitter reserves these bespoke emojis for its biggest advertisers, asking for a “seven-figure” price for them as a bundle deal in conjunction with its other ad products such as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and the newly introduced Promoted Moments.

What Brands Need To Do
Ever since Twitter came out with the first branded emoji for Coca-Cola, we anticipated it would sell more of the new ad unit. Now with the million-dollar asking price, it seems fair to say that Twitter has established branded emojis as a premium ad product. It remains to be seen whether Twitter will expand the availability of such custom emojis in the future, but for now, it has become a costly but flashy sparkle for brands to add atop their Twitter campaigns.

 

Source: AdWeek

Twitter To Put Periscope Live Streams In Timelines

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter is about to give its livestreaming app Periscope a huge boost by integrating the live streams into its iOS app and allowing users to watch the broadcasts right in their timelines. This feature is set to roll out over the next few days, with support for its Android app in the works.

What Brands Need To Do
In June, Nestlé became the first brand to run a paid campaign on Periscope, and BMW debuted an interactive live-action campaign on Periscope later in October. Now with the added exposure, brands will be able to reach a much bigger audience with their live broadcasts, which offer brands a great shortcut to get their content in front of a mobile audience in real time. If your brand has yet to try out live streaming, now would be the time.

 

Source: Wired

Best Of The Lab 2015: Social Commerce Is Heating Up

Posted on by Lab Team

Welcome to the Lab’s year-end review, looking back at some of our best and most popular posts from 2015.

One of the key trends from this year was the surge of social commerce, i.e. ecommerce on social media channels. All big social channels came out with some variations of “buy buttons” and made a play for ecommerce dollars. Besides, brands have also been experimenting with new ways to engage with consumers on social channels, either through custom emojis or messaging apps. Is your brand ready to sell on social channels?

On Trend: Social Commerce Heats Up Again With “Buy Buttons”

ABC Uses Custom Hashtag-Emoji Combo To Unlock Previews On Twitter

Chinese Jewelry Retailer Deploys In-Store Beacons Via WeChat

 

Twitter Testing Multiple Emojis For Nuanced Responses

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter users may soon be able to respond to tweets with more than just “hearts,” which replaced its star-shaped “favorites” just two weeks ago. The social network is reportedly testing a new reaction feature that contains dozens of emojis for users to express their reactions in a more nuanced way. In early October, Facebook introduced a similar emoji “Reaction” feature allow users to react to posts beyond a simple “Like,” which is often inappropriate for posts expressing sadness or other negative emotions. The same reasoning applies to Twitter as well, which at the moment offers no details on the roll-out of this new feature.

What Brands Need To Do
If this feature does become available to the public, brands on Twitter can expect more quick responses of emojis replacing comments expressing similar reactions. This expansion of reactions can provide brands with a valuable tool to gauge customer feedback and measure their sentiment in a more granular way, enabling brands to adjust their communications strategy accordingly.

 

Source: The Verge

Header image from @_Ninji on Twitter

 

Twitter Debuts New “Brand Hub” To Track Audience Sentiment

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Twitter unveiled a new ad product named Brand Hub for tracking brand conversations across its platform. Within the hub, marketers and advertisers can dig into what Twitter users are saying about their brand, highlighting the top phrases they use and tracking indicators of brand loyalty and purchase intent. A brand new metric called TrueVoice was also introduced to help advertisers track the share of a conversation a brand takes up compared to its competitors in real time.

What Brands Need To Do
With Brand Hub, Twitter is offering brands a new tool to accurately gauge customer reactions and more accurately measure their sentiment, eliminating their need to resort to a third-party analytics services. The new TrueVoice metric can be especially helpful in highly competitive markets where a brand has to take control of real-time social conversations and see how it stacks up with major competitors so as to adjust communications strategies accordingly. Overall, it aims to provide brands with valuable insights into audience sentiment, something that all brands can learn a lot from.

 

Source: AdWeek