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| PARTNER CONTENT |
Twitter continues to evolve rapidly, but at the highest level, the vision for Twitter has not changed. At its best, the company believes Twitter can drive civilisation forward through the sharing of public information and dialogue. We want to give everyone a chance to express themselves freely, maintain a civil and brand safe platform and, at the same time, help brands strengthen their presence while growing their businesses.
More than ever, Twitter is what’s happening and what people are talking about. Our audience is alive and thriving, with over half a billion people now using Twitter every month.1 And they’re giving Twitter more of their time, with time spent on Twitter near all-time highs — over 32 minutes per day, an increase of +13.1% compared to the previous year.2
As the company evolves, Twitter’s advertising business has been transforming with it, focusing on building solutions that allow advertisers to launch campaigns that are informative, entertaining, and impactful.
The best brands on Twitter see incremental results across media metrics, and are considered to be highly culturally relevant. In fact, brand involvement in culture is especially important among consumers between the ages of 18 and 35.3 People on Twitter vs. the general population are more passionate, informed, and feel more strongly about brands aligning with culture.4
If you are exploring Twitter as a key component of your marketing strategy, here are things to keep in mind as your team builds a public brand presence.
1. Immersive video storytelling
Today, storytelling has become increasingly immersive, and video-first content remains a mainstay in content marketing. We’re building a full screen ad experience within our Immersive Video Viewer
to help advertisers tell more captivating brand stories and further benefit from the growth of video on Twitter. We haven't seen a video product this sticky since the early days of Vine.
Video now accounts for 72% of all Twitter user sessions globally, with video user active minute growth (+19% YoY) outpacting total user active minute growth.5
Within this, the Immersive Media Viewer has seen explosive growth since launching in September last year. More than 65 million users globally — almost half of which are Gen Z6 — consume videos daily, up 260% over the past six months.7
So, what are people watching? Creation and consumption reflects the broader public conversation: people come to Twitter to discover what’s happening and engage in a wide variety of passions. This means advertisers can reach their audiences around a rich context of sports, music, events, business, technology, and finance content (to name just a few!).
2. Build ads that entertain
Connecting with an audience has never been more challenging for businesses. With just moments to capture attention before customers move onto the next thing, it’s critical for brands to create unique experiences and engage with their audiences in a more personalised way.
Twitter has always been a place where brands and people come together and interact in meaningful ways. With Twitter Branded Features, brands and advertisers can enhance these interactions on the platform while also increasing engagement and conversation around their products, services, or special events.
Custom Likes
Custom Likes let brands customise Twitter’s Like Button to a new, custom branded animation (which appears after a Twitter user has liked a Tweet with the brand’s selected hashtag). During testing, Custom Likes generated positive impact when paired with Timeline Takeover, seeing a +277% lift in recall, and +202% lift in purchase and consideration intent.8
Hashfetti
We recently launched Hashfetti, which is a new, low-lift and highly visual feature that adds surprise and delight for Hashmoji (previously Branded Hashtag) search results. When Hashfetti is activated for a Hashmoji, the custom emoji will rain down on top of search results in a confetti-like animation whenever the activated Hashmoji has been clicked.
Hashfetti debuted in January 2023 with a creative launch of the new collaboration between Louis Vuitton (@LouisVuitton) and Yayoi Kusama. With Hashfetti as part of their launch strategy, people played Hashfetti 3 times.9
So far, over 30 brands across the world have activated Hashfetti since its launch, with Lazada Thailand (@LazadaTH) being the first in Southeast Asia. With Hashfetti activated, brands have seen up to a 28x increase in Hashmoji clicks and 31x increase in users clicking Hashmojis, in comparison to daily averages prior to Hashfetti.10
3. From Tweeting to talking
People already come to Twitter to know what’s happening. Now, Spaces lets you hear the voices of people you follow talking about what’s happening now and what’s most important to you — live.
From Tweeting to talking, reading to listening, Twitter Spaces encourages and unlocks real, open conversations on Twitter with the nuance, depth, and power only the human voice can bring. These ephemeral, live audio conversations allow for open, authentic, and unfiltered discussions, and there’s a Space for any and every topic and conversation, from small and intimate to millions of listeners. Anyone can join, listen, and speak in a Space on Twitter for iOS and Android.
Live Spaces appear at the top of the timeline, making it easy for people to join yours. It’s your Space, so you get to decide who can speak and when. It’s important to us that people feel safe hosting and participating in Spaces conversations — that’s why we’ve built in safety controls available to hosts and speakers.
4. Share your stories as they unfold with live video
Live events are a staple for brands. It’s where your audience can come together under one roof, be it a conference, concert, or sporting event. It’s where ideas are exchanged, products are introduced, and people gather to be entertained.
At the high level of the funnel, we’ve seen that live events drive lifts in both brand awareness and favourability, beyond those that we see during non-live brand moments. People exposed to live events showed a nearly 80% higher lift in brand awareness, and a 57% higher lift in brand favorability.11 And in Southeast Asia, consumers love live events from brands, with product launch events consistently being one of the top live contents for Twitter’s users, together with news, sports or entertainment events.12
Whether you’re broadcasting live from the studio, the sidelines, the red carpet, the scene of a breaking news event, or just because you want to connect with your followers, Twitter offers easy-to-use tools to share what’s happening
One of our favourite (and most fashionable) examples of live events was when luxury brand Prada delighted fans with a 15-minute long sci-fi-inspired catwalk as the centrepiece of the launch campaign for its Fall Winter 2022 Womenswear Collection.
5. Drive influence with creators
Our teams are extremely focused on bringing a diverse set of creators, and empower various communities to thrive on the platform.
More than any other platform, Twitter is about conversation. Creators turn to Twitter to build a community, and their followers come to the platform to connect directly with the creators they love the most. Creators are not just influential — they entertain, inform and inspire audiences by sharing original content every single day. Today, these creators have the power to shape your brand’s narrative and spark a conversation around your products and services. On Twitter, they are more than just a part of “what’s happening.” In fact, 2 of 3 Twitter users agree that creators actually change and shape culture.13
Twitter’s native solutions allow brands to leverage the power of creator economy, and drive engagement through the vast following of top creators on the service. We are also witnessing the rise of micro-influencers, and niche trends allowing brands to connect with capive audiences within such communities
Allowlisting solution from Twitter allows your brand to promote a ‘Creator Tweet’ to a targeted audience. The brand has an opportunity to reach the creator’s audience, and amplify the reach of the campaigns on Twitter.
We also closely work with several of our agency partners, and give brands access to their creator portfolio for partnerships.
One great example is #CornettoCONEfessions campaign, in which Cornetto Philippines (@SelectaCornetto) engaged with influencers via Twitter’s engagement model — Influencer Sponsorship — to encourage lovestruck teens and young adults to express their feelings. Cornetto-related conversions surged 73X during the campaign period, making Cornetto the most talked about ice-cream brand on Twitter in the Philippines during that period.14
6. Take greater control with brand safety solutions
We’ve always understood that our business and revenue are interconnected with our mission; they rely on each other. The only way we will achieve our mission is by maintaining a civil and brand safe platform. We are committed to the health of conversation on Twitter, and the safety of our users and your brand.
As we evolve, we’re giving people greater transparency and control over their experience on the platform, and this includes our advertisers.
We recently partnered with Sprinklr for an independent assessment of hate speech on Twitter, which we’ve been sharing data on publicly for several months. Sprinklr’s AI-powered model found that the reach of hate speech on Twitter is even lower than our own model quantified.
We know that some parts of Twitter aren’t for everyone — even if the content isn’t violative. So, to give advertisers greater control over where their brand appears, we’ve introduced two critical solutions:
Adjacency controls prevent ads from appearing adjacent to Tweets with keywords or from certain authors you’d like to avoid. We have over 1600+ advertisers leveraging Adjacency Controls with a ~99% efficacy rate.
Third-party brand safety measurement: In addition, we’re continuing to expand our partnerships with industry-leading brand safety partners DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. In early Q1 2023, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science will offer their post-bid brand safety reporting for Tweets in our Home Timeline at scale to our advertising partners. This reporting will give advertisers transparency on the context in which their ads served, according to the GARM Brand Safety & Suitability Framework.
As we continue to offer advertisers more opportunities to connect with a wider audience than ever before on Twitter, we’re committed to evolving our suite of brand safety solutions to ensure a safe, relevant, and valuable ad experience for people and brands.
Audiences today have more options for consuming media than ever, it is more challenging than ever for brands to create content that excels both in how it resonates and how it performs.
If you are ready to push the creative boundaries of what’s possible on Twitter for your brand, Twitter’s in-house creative team, Next, is here to help!
Rishabh Sharma, head of Twitter Next, INSEA & ANZ, Twitter.
Sources
[1] Twitter internal data, Q1 2023 vs. Q1 2022. Global.
[2] Twitter Internal. Jan-May 2023 vs. Jan-May 2022. Global.
[3,4] MAGNA & Twitter "The Impact of Culture" research, 2019, US/CA/BR/UK
[5] Twitter Internal. Comparing Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022. Global.
[6] Twitter Internal Data, Global, Immersive Media Viewer Video Played, Apr’23
[7] Twitter Internal Data, Global, Immersive Media Viewer Video Player Plays, 31 Oct - 31 Mar, iPhone and Web App
[8] Twitter internal data from Branded Likes while in Beta testing Oct 2021 - Jan 2022. Brand Effect Results of Branded Like Campaigns in US, UK, JP. Branded Like Add on to Timeline Takeover (n=7). Control group defined as respondents who were not exposed to promoted Tweets that were a part of the Branded Likes campaigns. These numbers may change in general availability and may vary depending on region.
[9] Twitter internal data for #LVxYayoiKusama, Jan. 6-7, 2023.
[10] Twitter Internal Hashfetti Data, Q1 2023, (n=16) Hashfetti Activations, Global data. Compared to daily average of Pre & Post Time Frame: Up to 7 days pre-activation and up to 7 days post-activation.
[11] Twitter Internal Data, Q1'21-Q3'21 US Live Events Brand Effect Studies. n=7 Live Brand Events.
[12] Video Behaviours on Twitter study, May 2022, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, n=500 Twitter monthly users in each market. Question: Have you ever watched any of the following types of content via a live-stream in the following platforms?.
[13] Twitter + Magna IPG Media Lab, ‘Art of the Creator’, 2018.
[14] Twitter internal data, compared to other ice-cream brands in the Philippines on average campaign days in months prior to the campaign.
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