Twitter Unveils Everyday Moments

Turns Out Everyone Is Talking About Everything, Everywhere

Twitter long ago passed the tipping point into becoming a fundamental part of people’s daily lives. It’s had its hand in love affairs, reunited families, even national revolutions. Despite all this, plus a raft of new features and a steadily growing user base, last quarter the micro-blogging company still posted a GAAP loss of $145 million. Twitter is huge, but still a long way from being profitable enough to stand on its own, independent of investors.

It is this constant concern which has informed many of the company’s decisions in recent times, a series of moves which are clearly designed to appeal far more to advertisers than to the average user. A few days ago the company announced the introduction of video adverts, a popular move among companies who want to promote themselves through social media but are well aware of how little attention the much-hated banner ad garners.

That’s why Twitter’s latest innovation, while fun for the man on the street to play around with, is obviously intended to make the process of promotion through the site an even more attractive option.

Everyday Moments is an analytics tool which allows users to track the mentions of topics across the UK, either individually or measured against each other, across the course of the week. One can, for example, see how mentions of wine and tea spike and spread at different times of day (and note with interest the odd concentration of chatter about wine at 8 am in Leicester) or see how talk of the gym is gradually overtaken by talk of the pub as Friday slides closer.

It’s all very entertaining, and a nice spark for a casual ‘correlation vs. causation’ debate. But as the company’s blog post announcing the feature makes clear, this is a feature very definitely aimed at potential marketing clients. Twitter is pushing the idea of an ‘always on’ approach; rather than have finite campaigns, or timed slots, Twitter wants advertisers to be constantly engaged, constantly reacting to the ebb and flow of conversations on the site.

It’s a novel angle to push and obviously one which would greatly benefit Twitter, with its uniquely real-time flow of updates and capacity for both direct and mass communication. One can see how it might even work in practice, considering that Twitter has implemented a ‘pay per click’ model for video adverts on the site – advertisers pay every time a user plays one of their videos, rather than a flat rate. If Twitter could persuade marketers to sign up to some sort of system whereby the site got paid every time a user clicked an advertiser’s link it could prove revolutionary for a site which has thus far relied primarily on individually sponsored tweets.

Social media has revolutionised individual communication, broadening audiences and hastening the pace of conversation. To a large extent, however, marketing remains stuck in a pre-digital mindset. Whether or not this innovation is the next great step forward in advertising strategy remains to be seen, but what is certain is that Twitter is making the right move in looking for it.

Douglas Clarke-Williams

Douglas is an English Literature graduate who has written about everything from music to food to theatre, now a content creator for Social Media Frontiers. No topic too large or too small. Follow him @DouglasAtSMF.

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