Right to reply: The New Twitter – a sticky, revenue-rich service that blitzes the third-party apps

Twitter is now a ‘destination website’ and that means it is gunning for Facebook, but cleverly avoiding a direct dogfight. It’s more an information network than a social network and so is offering much, much more. Tanya Goodin, CEO of search and social conversion agency Tamar comments…


Twitter has been clever, quite aggressive and this should put paid to all the bleats of ‘yes but how are they going to monetise it?’ In a word – stickiness. More eyeballs staying longer will be a very attractive promotional play for brands.
It’s a hugely significant change for Twitter and squeezes the blood supply to the Twitter desktop apps that have fed off it. It opens up the experience to brands and advertisers, making the experience so multimedia rich that the revenues will surely follow. It’s a game changer. With the ‘re-launch’, Twitter hasn’t just kept ahead – it has leapt ahead.
Evan Williams, Twitter CEO (@ev) says the service is signing 370,000 new users a day and while Facebook has passed the half-billion user milestone, recent data suggests the new-user numbers are declining so it may be that FB has peaked, which gives Twitter a commercial space to occupy.
The implications for SEO are all in real-time search. Twitter has announced 16 partnership deals so if Google is taking results directly from these, then tweets will be pushed even higher up Google’s natural results.
The move is also very good news for brands – adding multimedia in-stream gives them far more flexibility, creativity and control over messaging. If they’d had this a few weeks ago the Old Spice guy could have been a smash hit on Twitter rather than YouTube.
YouTube has a massive user base but I think this might have an impact on the service. If Twitter becomes a destination site then users might well consume video in location rather than going to YouTube, whose advertisers aren’t going to be happy. However, YouTube is essentially a video search engine now – whereas Twitter still struggles to let you find anything posted beyond the previous seven days.
However, some of the best videos being shared on YouTube have been uploaded months ago. By offering inline videos, Twitter will be great for ‘current’ content, but after it has scrolled out of Twitter’s archive it’s basically gone – unless the service can sort that out.
By Tanya Goodin
CEO
www.tamar.com
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