Twitter recognizes the value of ecommerce and analytics, CEO Dick Costolo says: it just is not going to focus its energies on developing these strategies. Rather, he said, in a keynote speech at All Things D's media conference, the company is going to maintain focus on its advertising products. It is a welcome change from a few years ago when the platform didn’t even offer advertising. "We don't feel like we need to add another component to the business," Costolo said. (via Ad Age). "We think we can do it with what we already have…. We just need to scale it up."
Twitter Leads Social Media Sharing Growth
There are a number of reasons why advertisers focus on Twitter starting with how quickly a message can go viral on the platform, for better or for worse–hopefully, the former.
Twitter led all social networks in the percentage increase of sharing by members from launch until now, according to Unruly Media. It found that from its inception until now, shares on Twitter grew an astounding 35,356%. This was more than six times the 5,809% growth in Facebook Likes.Twitter has been redesigning its site to favor advertising—and make it as sticky as possible. Last December it introduced new buttons to be used for people to organize their content on the microblogging site as part of a new look for the site. It is contemplating introducing brand pages, according to news reports. It is also targeting small and medium sized businesses with a self-service ad platform.
More established ad products include its Promoted Tweets to Followers — a service that lets advertisers insert their ads directly in the timelines of those consumers that are following them on the Twitter.com site. It has also promised to expand the offering to analyze the followers of a given company's feed, then send ads to those users who aren't following, but have similar interests and friend lists.
From Zero to $150M
At the beginning of 2011, eMarketer predicted that Twitter would earn $150 million in revenues for the year, a substantial increase over revenues of $45 million during 2010, the first year Twitter sold advertising. By 2012, ad revenues on the site will reach $250 million, it predicted.
