When the Rooster team were invited to Twitter’s headquarters in Piccadilly Circus for their #TwitterAllAccess morning, a part of us just wanted to see if the office was as amazing as it sounds!
While we enjoyed making our coffee via an iPad, the morning was actually a pretty useful insight into the social media industry with some key points emerging about advertising, emojis and what’s next for Twitter, including developments to their ads and safety.
From a brands perspective, Twitter is constantly improving making their advertising options easier to use and more varied, with Promoted Moments, Conversational Ads (i.e. #Team Cap vs #TeamIronMan for Captain America Civil War), Tweet Carousels with a ‘gallery’ effect, and a First View option where a brand can ensure its video is the first thing users see when they log in. They’re also working more on their safety and blocking features to fight trolls and abuse online, something many users deal with on a daily basis.
Twitter has merged with some pretty cool platforms. Their newest venture is Magic Pony, which they bought for £150million and works as an AI platform for image recognition, which can detect ‘bad’ images and block them on the site. They’ve also acquired Vine, Periscope, Niche and GoPro over the years so are working hard on the live video aspects of the social platform.
Brand campaigns on Twitter are the way to get creative. WWF’s #EndangeredEmoji campaign donated whenever someone tweeted with an animal emoji that was endangered, Dominoes let you order with the pizza emoji for their #EasyOrder campaign, and the England Football Team delivers live scores to your phone with a simple DM (something that, with the slight TV delay, sometimes means it gets to you before the TV does!). Our favourite in the office though, was the Taco Bell #TacoEmojiEngine, where you tweet them with a taco emoji + another emoji for a tailor made gif with 600 combinations. Emoji’s are officially taking over!
Sometimes more IS better. When it comes to advertising campaigns for clients, it was interesting to learn that sometimes it’s better to do 20+ campaigns instead of just one. To explain why this actually makes sense, instead of one big generic campaign, activating 20 smaller audience targeting ones means you can then see which audiences are most receptive, and then reduce the number to just one or two out of those 20 campaigns, creating a much better influencer list for your campaign to reach.
From news about drones streaming Periscope to the most used word on Twitter last year not even being a ‘word’ but the crying emoji, there’s a lot in the pipeline. Using Twitter for brands, especially as live video has become the next big thing and Periscope is now embedded in your Twitter feed, it will be interesting to see how it plays out amongst the new game-changing social platforms out there.
By Kara Godfrey
