FORUM DESCRIPTION Assuming you can’t wave a magic wand and replace Twitter’s und
ID: 351850 • Letter: F
Question
FORUM DESCRIPTION
Assuming you can’t wave a magic wand and replace Twitter’s underlying technology, please address each of the following: (NOTE: Copy/paste each question followed by your developed response. Do this throughout the course for all discussion threads.)
What is Twitters strategy?
Who is Twitter’s intended market?
Who are the main competitors in this space?
How can Twitter differentiate its value in this space?
How would you position Twitter in the marketplace? (target customers/value)Twitter has seen an upturn in both publicity and usage due Trump’s entrance on to the political stage. In addition to Trump’s specific following, political pundits and news media personnel have also seen boost as a result.
How would you attempt to take advantage of this?
How could you replicate this approach for non-political segments?
Explanation / Answer
What is Twitters strategy?
Twitter is 10 years old this year, making one of the grand-daddies of the social networking family. The platform’s 313 million monthly active users send more than 500 million Tweetsevery day. More importantly for marketers, Twitter users are actively discovering and interacting with businesses through the social network.
Sixty-six percent of Twitter users have discovered a new small or medium-sized business(SMB) through the network, 79 percent have retweeted an SMB, and a whopping 94 percent plan to make a purchase from the SMBs they follow. And that’s not just talk. Sixty-nine percent have already purchased from an SMB because of something they saw on Twitter.
Twitter may not be the media darling it used to be, but after a full decade online, Twitter’s user base is still growing. And the number of users who interact with the site every day is holding steady at 38 percent in 2015, up slightly from the 36 percent who used the site every day in 2014.
Who is Twitter’s intended market?
Recently, Twitter rolled out a new marketing strategy which includes videos explaining what Twitter stands for, distinguishing it from other social media platforms. This effort stems from the company’s research which revealed that, while 90% of people globally recognized the Twitter brand but did not use the site because they misunderstood what Twitter is. The company is now looking to change the perception of Twitter from being a social network enabling users to connect with family and friends to being the “go to” place for all news updates. Twitter is positioning itself as a unique platform where news ranging from big events to local updates along with live commentary can be accessed. We believe that, as a decade-old company that is struggling to grow its user base, a marketing strategy that highlights its uniqueness can attract more users to its platform.
Who are the main competitors in this space?
So why is there no Twitter competitors? The truth is, Twitter has had - and continues to have - a number of lower-profile competitors such as Plurk (big in Taiwan), Jaiku (owned by Google), identi.ca and many others. But are these platforms real competitors? Put it this way, we don't think Twitter is looking over its shoulder at them. Tumblr is a slightly more sophisticated microblogging platform than Twitter. But it's more like a traditional blogging tool, a kind of stripped-down, simplified version of WordPress, where you can use your own domain name and post videos, images, links and, of course, text.
Tumblr is continuing to grow in popularity, but it's for a different type of user than Twitter. And even if Tumblr continues to snowball, it's not likely to steal users away from Twitter, there's plenty of room for both platforms to coexist peacefully.
Many social networks have microblogging functionality built-in to their interfaces - the humble 'status update' is a form of microblogging. But Twitter's simplicity is why it has the dedicated microblogging market sewn up - it spotted a niche in the social media market and got things right from the start.
There is space for niche, pockets of competition for sure, but Twitter has gained the critical mass of users to sustain its growth far beyond the 200m users it currently has
How can Twitter differentiate its value in this space?
Twitter is fast-paced, concise, and easy way to connect with your audience. With over 310 million registered users (and growing), Twitter is a sea of information of 140 character or less content waiting to be read, clicked, followed, and re-tweeted.
Twitter generates over 175 million tweets daily and allows you to share quick pieces of information and photos in an effort to drive people back to your site or landing pages. You only get a small amount of characters, so make them count!
When marketing on Twitter, you need to have content that is enticing enough for people to stop and click through. People are normally scrolling through quickly so it takes more than just simple text to stop them in their tracks. Make sure when you're constructing your tweets, you’re making people want to click through.
How would you position Twitter in the marketplace? (target customers/value)Twitter has seen an upturn in both publicity and usage due Trump’s entrance on to the political stage. In addition to Trump’s specific following, political pundits and news media personnel have also seen boost as a result.
Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary. He wants four more years of Obama – but nobody else does!” Donald Trump sneered on Twitter.
But for once, it was Clinton’s riposte back in June which went viral. “Delete your account,” she retorted in what became her most widely shared tweet ever, partly because these three words are a well-known internet meme broadly translatable as “You are so laughably dumb you should disappear from the face of the earth.” (Imagine Theresa May responding to Boris Johnson crashing out of the leadership race with some sassy emojis and a car crash gif, and you’re halfway there.) But it’s also because that was the moment political Twitter beefs – aggressively personal slanging matches between rivals on social media – went mainstream. And that has implications for the political culture surrounding us all.
Nobody cares about smart alecks trading insults in an empty room, of course, and to anyone who doesn’t use Twitter – most Britons – it doubtless looks fairly empty. But then nobody really cared back in the 80s when Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters first responded to commercial pressures on American broadcasters by peppering his scripts with simple, punchy clips a few seconds long. Nobody cared much when, a few years later, rolling 24-hour news took off in Britain. And by the time we’d woken up to the way sound bites plus a newly voracious news cycle that had changed both political debate and the nature of who prospers in it – well, it was too late. You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already.
How would you attempt to take advantage of this?
Understand the extent of social search
We might as well begin with the basics.
Social and search are merging. This is no longer pie-in-the-sky conjecture. It is the reality of the here-and-now.
Already, social platforms have robust search algorithms built in to them.
Facebook’s innocuous search bar can turn into a powerful social search. An advanced search can produce surprisingly focused results. I can even find friends who aren’t my friends
Employ an ongoing social strategy
Admittedly, this is a broad application, but it’s one that I must insist on.
Twitter and Google’s partnership sends a clarion call to the digital marketing world: Social matters. Big time.
Brands — from enormous companies to individual personalities — must have a social presence. But social presence isn’t enough.
It’s now necessary to have an ongoing methodology for advancing a social media agenda.
In the early days of the web, a business thought that it was doing a good job simply by having a website. Websites were digital placeholders.
Then around 2009 we realized that brands needed to produce content on a regular basis! The blog boom was born.
How could you replicate this approach for non-political segments?
Twitter is one of the most popular micro-blogging services in the world. Micro-blogging allows the publication of short text messages, used to share all kinds of information; on Twitter, these messages are called “tweets” (their maximum length is 140 characters), and many millions of them are posted every day
Twitter has proven to be a relevant data source to explore public sentiment trends ([4, 32]). Its content is easily available, and its flexible nature allows harvesting open conversations, public opinions, and news commentaries. Another crucial characteristic of Twitter is its timeliness; this peculiarity guarantees that tweets are related to a much narrower temporal window with respect to other user-generated texts, such as blogs
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