Each June, in luxurious Cannes, France, the Lions International Festival of Creativity is held. This event brings companies in the communications business together to celebrate the year’s most innovative groups. Tim Bradshaw’s attended the festival, and highlights the media attention Twitter executives received there in his article.
Led by the head of revenue, Adam Bain, Twitter executives met with an assortment of advertising companies. The executives, looking to increase profitability for marketers, promised to make Twitter more ad friendly. Twitter ads, referred to as promoted tweets, didn’t exist until last year. Twitter introduced peer to peer advertising because, despite having roughly 300 million users, Twitter has issues generating revenue. Social networking sites make money primarily off of advertisers, so this seems like the best strategy if they want to compete with the likes of Facebook.
Bradshaw comments on how Twitter will go about becoming more ad-friendly. Twitter will begin by creating custom profile pages for marketing companies, enhancing them further than the basic template page users normally have.
Twitter discussed letting promoted tweets “hang” in the Twitter timeline. The timeline feature will send real-time tweets from those you follow or from query searches, appearing chronologically. If the implement this change, promoted tweets will remain stationary in timeline, even if they had been posted hours before.
Twitter might put promoted trends at the front of their public timeline. This would replace tweets from regular users with ads. Twitter executives are hesitant because they fear that this change is too aggressive, and could alienate their users.
Twitter does not want to move too far away from its original mission, which is to create a network for people. However, to compete, they must open up to more advertising if they hope to boost revenue.
At Chitika, we understand how much demand for advertising there is on social networking sites. Though we are not a social networking site, we do like to keep up with the advertising trends that are happening on sites like Twitter and Facebook.