Twitter Moves To Monetize Mobile
Promoted Tweets — read: ads — are coming to the Twitter mobile client streams. I suspect the initial reaction will be: “Great! Another reason to use TweetBot!”
But I actually don’t view this as a negative thing. Twitter is a service that many of us use and love for hours on end every single day. It’s a great service. But like any great service, if it’s to stick around, it needs to make money. I don’t begrudge them trying to do that.
They’ve been experimenting with various ways to do this, and apparently the Promoted Suite of products is working well enough that they’re now expanding it to the mobile experiences. In fact, a Promoted Tweet was the most retweeted Tweet last year.
It’s interesting that Twitter only gets paid when a user takes an action (retweet, reply, etc) on these Tweets. In other words, they’re cost-per-action not cost-per-impression. Again, a good choice because it will naturally lead to higher quality Tweet Ads (or retweet-bait, I suppose).
And hey, at least it’s not the DickBar.
Source: parislemon
Source: Laughing Squid
Coincidence or intentional, it’s pretty cool how the signs line up. @tehawesome. Teh awesome indeed. Guess what’s next on the keyboard? It’s the $ sign! :D
Source: twitter.com
Facebook: That six degrees thing is now less than five! Twitter: Been there done that.
Much had been said about how everyone on Facebook is now connected by less than five degrees. I think what Facebook does is not much more than show that fact, a reflection if you will, of the many personal and professional connections we’ve made outside of the online social network. A research from Sysomos published last year showed similar results for Twitter.
Perhaps my use of Twitter and Facebook clouds my judgement somewhat but I find that Twitter allows me to connect with more people than Facebook does and those connections are much more meaningful and more valuable. As the saying goes, Facebook is for people you went to school with, Twitter is for people you wish you went to school with.
Honestly, I care little of the connections reflected on Facebook, I have little to no interest in the updates from people that Facebook shows me on its news feed. It’s not necessarily Facebook’s fault though that people I’m friends with on Facebook don’t post content that interest me, and I blame those who litter my news feed with stupid updates such as game requests.
Updates on Twitter on the other hand, are much more interesting to me because they bring new information, amusing stories, facts and discoveries and they made me appreciate the people who deliver those tweets more than those who post updates on Facebook.
Getting back to the research, if we go back a few more years, I bet we would see similar results for Friendster if such a research was done around that time. It’s not Facebook that brought connections closer, it’s the Internet. Facebook only shows it.
Those #SMWTF tweets
Social Media World Forum Asia was held in Singapore earlier this week. All kinds of people with interest in social media were there from various parts of the world talking essentially about using so called social media for marketing, promotions, brand building, and stuff like that which is probably a fancy way of saying they’re trying to figure out how to sell stuff to people without looking like they’re selling anything.
Mr. Brown, the ever influential Singaporean that he is, took the chance and turned it into something a little more entertaining.
So this is @irene. The real Irene.
At the beginning of last week, people began tweeting messages to me to, somehow, communicate with Hurricane Irene. In response, on Thursday, I posted ”Btw, tweeting messages to @irene doesn’t deliver any messages to the hurricane. Sorry.”
Friends started retweeting the post, and more and more people started seeing it and following my account. By Friday morning, that tweet was reshared more than 100 times. I didn’t think much of it.
In case you missed it, here’s a collection of @irene’s entertaining tweets during the hurricane that said hi to the eastern seaboard of the United States.
the question now isn’t whether social media can start a revolution, but whether dictators believe it can.
More and more tweets from iPhone or Android apps in my timeline. Last year almost all comes from Blackberry apps. Shift happens, RIM.
160 users in three months, 200 million in 5 years
Twitter only had 160 users after three months but they were sending up to 1000 messages per day, or roughly 6 messages per person per day. Of course, the whole thing didn’t really start to catch on until March 2007 at SXSW. That’s when they started to get thousands of users.
URL Shorteners
The Jakarta Globe today this week introduced its own shortened URL to help identify and track links that goes to its stories from Twitter.
I’m a huge fan of custom URLs because it tells you where your link goes. While shorteners like goo.gl, bit.ly and tinyurl are fine for the general public, these private, branded ones like aol.it, tcrn.ch, engt.co, on.mash.to and jglo.be are much better for content publishers as well as everyone else.
While publishers will be able to track the links, readers will be assured that they won’t be duped into going to another site.
Of course, then we come across Twitter for Mac that automatically shortens any URL that gets manually entered into it to t.co. Whoever thought this would be a great idea needs to be put into a blender. By the way, this URL issue with the app deserves a post on its own.
[update] Turns out the link on each of @thejakartaglobe’s tweet leads not to individual articles but to the category page the article belongs to. This puts a major dampener on the excitement front and pulls out the, “what the fuck were you thinking?” banner.
