I am waiting for the day that there is a new buzz word to be talking about, but today it is still Twitter. So what have they been doing? Are they making money yet? Do they have any new features? Well you have many questions and maybe I can answer a few of them for you.
Promoted Tweets
First we’ll start with a product they launched back in April, “Promoted Tweets.” These “Promoted Tweets” are not ads. They’re tweets with one difference: A promoted tweet will stay out there as long as people are engaging with it, and only when they’ve stopped will it disappear. Right now you pay for 1,000 views, but as Twitter tweaks their algorithm this will change. Next the advertiser claims a keyword and sets a budget. Now this looks like a regular tweet except there is some shading at the bottom of the tweet and it says “Promoted by (insert company here).” As long as people are interacting with the tweet by re-tweeting it, the tweet will stay in the search results. The interesting thing is that if an advertiser’s ad is so lame that no one re-tweets it Twitter refunds the rest of the budget that is unused and lets some other company reserve it. Right now it is only open to a few companies- Sony Pictures, Virgin America, Starbucks and Best Buy.
Who To Follow
If you use Twitter’s main platform and not a 3 party platform then you will see that a “Who to follow” field has been added on the right-hand menu (I should point out that I am not 100% sure about all 3rd party platforms but I use Tweetdeck and I do not see it on there.) Twitter figures that with more that 100 million users there are probably people who share the same interests as you do. IMO, this is just another version of social graphing, but anyway they are showing you two people that you may like to follow. Their algorithm suggests profiles based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. I would also bet they are indexing the content of your tweets to determine relevancy.
Introducing Fast Follow, and Other SMS Tips
This new product allows anyone to receive tweets to their phone even if they have not signed up for Twitter. For example, let’s say you want to get tweets from New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. Just text “follow NotifyNYC” to 40404 in the U.S. After you do that you will receive text messages from the user you followed. For additional SMS tips you can read more here http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/introducing-fast-follow-and-other-sms.html
Pushing Our (Tweet) Button
Twitter wants you to share what you find online and they have just made it easier. Yesterday (August 12, 2010) they launched their “Tweet Button.” From the mouth of Twitter,
“This button lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear — pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.”
Instead of me boring you with an explanation why don’t you sit back, relax and watch this video.
I hope that you Twitter users can use some of these cool new products. The one big question that is still to be answered is how are any of these great product releases going to make Twitter any money and how are they going to continue after they blow through the 55 million in venture capital money they raised?
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