Twitter’s new look
Twitter tweaked its design on Tuesday to automatically display photos and Vine videos, creating a more dynamic, media-driven interface. All good, right? Not quite.
The tweak is actually a big change to Twitter’s user experience. Instead of scrolling through micro-bits of texts and selecting what they want to click on, consumers are now bombarded with content they’d have previously scrolled past or never seen at all.
For brands, the change may be welcome because they’ll be assured consumers will see the photos and ads they shelled out for. It’s one less click between viewer and advertisement—a sign Twitter is working on innovating its service with brands in mind.
A more media-friendly Twitter has long been a request of advertisers, but it’s also a loss of part of Twitter’s core value proposition to advertisers – that it connects consumers to ads they actually want to see.
The promise of social media marketing has always been that it’s a different type of communication between brand and consumer, a conversation in which the latter is a willing participant. With the new design, consumers will see media from both brands they follow and those that purchase promoted tweets. User choice doesn’t matter any more.
Auto-displaying photos and Vines undeniably makes it more like Facebook, Google Plus and its other social peers than the constrained network that forced us to share in just 140 characters.
As Facebook has shown, consumers adapt quickly to changes and Twitter users are likely to stick around through further advertising-friendly tweaks. The risk Twitter runs, however, is altering its users’ relationship to its ads for the worse.
As its clients surely know, consumers are more receptive to marketing they choose to consume.
Does your social marketing kill kittens?
This week a Twitter account called Your Tweets Are Bad made the rounds, retweeting every half-assed brand tweet it could find along the way. Not one of the stale “RT if ______” tweet the account mockingly shared, though, was as nearly as offensive as the ones spotted by Scott Stratten in his new book, QR Codes Kill Kittens.
In the last issue of Marketing, we spoke to Stratten, president of Oakville, Ont.-based UnMarketing, about five of the worst Twitter gaffes brands have made in recent years.
From Kenneth Cole suggesting upheaval in Egypt was the result of a spring sale to Pabst Canada making a “fat chicks” joke, Stratten rated the worst of the worst brand tweets for us. Take a look back at these social missteps for inspirations on what not to do.
Pur gum founder sends Marketing a YouTube video
When brands send their products to Marketing, I often take a picture, make a gif or video to share on social media. This week the Canadian brand Pur Gum sent an 80 gram pack of its gum. When I decided to try to eat all at once it didn’t go well.
Seeing the goofy video, brand founder Jay Klein made a response video on YouTube, one-upping me by completing my gum challenge and finishing the entire 80 gram pack. It was a small media play – together the videos have been viewed about 125 times – but also a great example of the one-to-to communication that delights consumers online.
The Numbers
A new survey by the Pew Research Center in the U.S. illuminates the relationship between Facebook and news. As Facebook looks to sell itself to advertisers as real-time service, more emphasis has been put on Facebook as a place to turn to for breaking news and event coverage, including an event this summer for Canadian media to learn how to drive more interaction on news posts on Facebook hosted by Vadim Lavrusik, a former New York Times and Mashable journalist who is now public content manager at Facebook.
30%
Americans who say they get news from Facebook, which rises to 47% of adult Facebook users who consider the network a news source
4%
Facebook users who say the site is the “most important” way they get news
42%
Facebook news consumers (those who consume news often on Facebook) who watch local TV news
73%
Facebook news consumers who regularly read entertainment news on Facebook, the most popular type of news content on the site
65%
Facebook news consumers who regularly read about their own community, the next most popular type of news on Facebook
34%
Facebook news consumers who have at least one news organization or journalist in their feed
