There have been a few changes occurring on Twitter during the last week. What are they and how do they affect you?
New Twitter CEO wanted
Firstly, the CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, will step down in July. He will be replaced in the interim by the company’s co-founder and chairman of the board Jack Dorsey.
Costolo has been known for being outspoken in his views regarding Twitter, but admits that some of the mistakes made are his and his alone. The subject of trolling is one that comes up again and again. He said in February “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lost core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.” (source: http://bit.ly/1Tg2gP7)
It will be interesting to watch whether this issue will be addressed under Jack Dorsey, including Twitter’s ad revenue. The company accounted for less than 1% of the $145bn spent on digital advertising worldwide in 2014 according to eMarketer.
News for hashtag lovers
For us as businesses it may not affect us as much as the next report that Twitter have filed. We are now being told that using hashtags or tags in our Twitter asverts that also contain call to action links are not as successful as those without a hashtag.
This is all down to a survey that Twitter have done with regards to their ad campaigns and how successful they are for businesses. Including other 'clickable' sections in a tweet (apart from the web or ad link) detracts from the subject in question, and a tweet that doesn’t include a # or @ mention will generate 23% more clicks.
This does not affect tweets which are joining in on a conversation or specific campaign. Twitter said “If you’re trying to join a conversation you should absolutely use a hashtag, but for driving clicks on a link which takes you away from Twitter, the less noise that you put in between [the better].” (source: http://on.recode.net/1JH42V9)
Private conversations get more space to breath
And finally, Twitter has announced that from July, they are upping their 140 character limit within Direct Messaging to 10,000. They have already lifted the option of being able to DM people you don’t follow (back in April, before then you had to be followed by the user before being able to DM them) as well as a group message option, and now they are enabling users to have longer conversations, comparing it to Facebook Messenger. (source: http://bit.ly/1Qt3ec8)
Chat apps are growing in popularity and Twitter have obviously caught hold of this and aiming to increase their usage. This means that as a business you can message influencers, colleagues and clients including those that don’t follow you, without transferring over to email or messenger. Whether it will mean more spam DM’s we will have to see.
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