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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Is Twitter Dead?
00:21:48
In this episode of the podcast, as well as shamelessly attempting to get attention with a doom-mongering headline we are discussing all things Twitter. The platform has seen some significant shifts and changes over the last few months so we thought we...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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A
And today, Daniel, we are asking, is Twitter dead?
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B
It's a very good question. Right, let's explain where this comes from. So I'll give you an example. I teach at Imperial College in London on the Master's program. We have 200 students. They are all 21 years old or thereabouts and they are about 85% international. So they are from all different parts of the world. And I always do the thing at beginning of the year, work out which social media platforms they're using and so on as well. So a couple of years ago we asked am I using Twitter? And about 95% of the hands got. Because they're marketing students, right, you'd expect them to use Twitter. We asked the same thing this year and of 200 students, four hands went up.
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A
Four?
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B
Yep. Out of 200. I then asked them how many of you don't really understand how Twitter works or what it is? And almost all the hands go up. So in a youth based audience, Twitter has a problem, really does have a problem. However, we looked at some other stats and what we've seen is that those people that are using Twitter are using it 10% more this year, we think, than they were last year in terms of growth. If you looked at the stats a couple of years ago, there were 320 million active Twitter accounts. There are now 340 million active Twitter accounts. Now that's an extra 20 million active accounts. It's slow by if you look at Facebook standards in terms of their growth. But bear in mind, we're using Facebook very differently now and we're using it less as well. So my feeling is that Twitter is fantastic. So I still love Twitter. Twitter, I should say this is my favorite social media channel still. But it's not right for some audiences. For the youth based audience now you're really going to struggle fairly obviously. Instagram, Snapchat is maybe the place to go. But let's just look at Twitter again and just take a bit of a step back and look at what's changed. We still drive loads of traffic from it. Yeah, it still works for us. So this is, in my opinion, Twitter absolutely isn't dead. But if you are 21 years old, there's some problems that Twitter really need to address with this as well.
- [02:16]
A
We should point out that's in the UK as well. The research you've done is quite.
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B
Yeah, well, it is and it isn't because these are 85% of these students are from other countries. So there's a really big spread of countries in there. Now, obviously the Chinese students won't be using it at all because they can't even access it in China. But we've got all over Europe, us, Asia and various other places. So it's a good straw pollinator. Yes. And that's all it is. We should say as well, there's not great scientific evidence behind that, but it gives you a feeling.
- [02:41]
A
The other thing I would add in there is because I've been looking into this recently and actually getting accurate stats out of the social media networks is quite hard. There's lots of reports out there, but very often they don't state when they took the statistics from. So we should caveat that if anybody's got any like more up to date resources or you question the figures we've just given out there, we'd love to hear from you.
- [03:04]
B
Yeah. And we'll check in with Twitter UK as well. So Dara is the MD there. We know Dara very well. It's an absolutely fantastic team over there. So we'll try and get some more backup stats to these as well. But what I would say is it's like any channel. I mean, it's certain channels for certain audiences, but there's some functionality changes. So you'll probably already be aware, if you're aware of Twitter at all, that Twitter has gone from 140 now to 280 characters.
- [03:26]
A
280, exactly, exactly.
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B
I wasn't really keen on this at all, to be honest. I quite like the fact that you had to squeeze things into 140 characters. Made you thought about what you were writing.
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A
Yeah. You were quite upset.
- [03:38]
B
I was quite upset. Now it's just like. It's like anything you get used to something being a certain way, they change it. It's outrageous. And now I'm like, yeah, whatever. I've got more space to write stuff. I think there's a lot less carefully crafted tweets out there at the moment. So I think it's not necessarily been a great thing, but Kieran discovered something that's launching very soon as well. So tell us about this, Kieran.
- [03:57]
A
Yeah. So it's a release that came out from. I think it like a Twitter press release. I picked up on where what they're looking to do, what they found. Obviously they've been looking at this like eager beavers really, because it's quite A big change or a lot of Twitter users were quite like Daniel, quite upset about it. But actually what they found is that over the last month, six weeks or so, that it's been active, they found that actually people are engaging more with the slightly longer tweets. So actually, you know, it's being embraced now. That could be because it's a new thing and actually everybody's kind of pushing out more.
- [04:32]
B
I also think it's too good. The day it launched, everyone started going, this is what I can do with 280 characters. And there was like a police one. I'm a police girl and I go, ni nor ninor Nino Nino for 280 characters and things like that. So, yeah, maybe, maybe the stats are a bit skewed at the moment.
- [04:48]
A
Well, the release kind of did reference that, which I think was fair and balanced. But what they thought would be really good is if actually, what if you could thread together several tweets so that you sort of, I suppose a bit like a slideshare presentation where you sort of thread together several things. And actually it's another medium of communication, I think, quite, quite interesting. If you've got the ability to do something like that. You could, I guess it's not dissimilar from the Twitter kind of Twitter story type.
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B
Well, people have been doing this already because they'll go one of four and then they'll do another tweet. Two or four, three or four. Four or four.
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A
It's providing that functionality within the platform.
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B
It makes sense because people are doing it anyway. So I think it does make perfect sense. And what they're calling this.
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A
So it's called thread. Yeah, Twitter threads.
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B
Okay, brilliant. So that's going to be available. Couple of other things that they have launched recently and then we'll talk about analytics. I got an email from Twitter saying, do you want Twitter Assistant? And Twitter Assistant is a thing. So Union Metrics do some free and some paid for tools that allow you to analyze your Twitter and your Instagram accounts. In fact. And an email came up from Twitter saying, I'll set up Twitter Assistant. I was a little bit surprised actually, because I'm not sure the commercial relationship between Twitter and Union Metrics. But ever since I've done this, they have been trying to sell with a premium tool. So just be aware, if you sign up for the free stuff, they're gonna sell the premium stuff, which is fair enough. What this does is do some analysis on your Twitter account. And if I look at mine now, it's telling me what My most top performing tweet was it tells me my biggest opportunity. So it reckons that I should do more video tweets. It reckons that Wednesday at 10pm is my best time to tweet, which seems slightly surreal. Tells me the best hashtags I've been using, the most influential contributors and it'll give me a bit more analysis as well. So you can get Twitter analytics anyway, so analytics.twitter.com when you're logged in, which we'll talk about in a second. But what I quite like is the time of day stuff and things like that. Now we've talked about Tweriad previously. Tweria does some of this stuff as well. But I take a look at this and we'll put the link into the notes as well. But it's under unionmetrics.com that you can set this up. So I thought that was quite a nice little thing.
- [06:55]
A
There's quite a few tools out there that do this. What I've begun to notice is there's a little bit of correlation between your own personal habits and what they tell you.
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B
So yeah, that's true.
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A
Very often I will post stuff out first thing in the morning for the target Internet accounts. And actually no surprise, these tools tend to suggest that early in the morning, if you're doing that, it's good. And actually I notice you very often if you've been out training or what.
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B
Have you overseas, basically saying, when I'm in the pub in the evening on my own, in a hotel basically, if I'm in a bar, yeah, you get.
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A
Quite active on Twitter. And so the tools look at what's going on and go, yeah, that's pretty good time for engagement.
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B
That's the problem. It's quiet because basically what they do, they say, okay, of all the tweets you posted, what time of day do they seem to be getting the most engagement? And the thing is, if you always tweet at the same time, it will say, oh, that's surprisingly the best time to do it. So you got to be careful if it's self fulfilling a little bit, it's an opportunity really.
- [07:46]
A
So experiment. Don't just go on what the tools tell you, dig a little bit deeper and experiment. And if you are posting out regularly at the same times, it becomes a sort of a self fulfilling prophecy in a way. So vary it up a little bit.
- [08:01]
B
So the other feature they've launched and we had the beta for this for a while, so they've just launched this out to everyone. But we tested out the beta of this, and this is the auto promote. So you pay a fixed monthly fee. I believe we're paying 79.95 or 80 quid a month. I think roughly that we're paying. And it automatically promotes my tweets into a large audience and they would reach otherwise. So what I can see is that I'm just going into my analytics for Twitter here, and for example, on a particular day I posted out six tweets. It said organic impressions 2966. So 3000 people kind of saw this stuff. Bearing in mind I've got about 7 or 8,000 followers in Twitter, so that's been shared a few times maybe, but promoted impressions was 3,000, so pretty much the same amount. So looking at my analytics, whatever I get in front of organically is at least normally being matched, if not slightly more in terms of impressions as well. Now, what I would kind of say with this is in terms of the amount of engagement that I'm getting, I'm getting pretty decent levels of engagement from all this as well. So overall, what it's. It's not setting the world on fire, but what it's doing is pretty much doubling the amount of people that see my tweets and actually doubling, at least in a lot of cases, the amount of clicks that I'm getting or the engagements I'm getting as well.
- [09:20]
A
I think it's exciting because you've got your followers and you're going to reach them. That's one of the nice things about Twitter is they don't throttle it back. You reach everybody, whether they're on. On the platform. And engaging with your tweet when it crops up within the kind of Twitter timeline is another thing. But I've always seen Twitter as sort of a. If I follow somebody, I'm giving them open license to spam me as much content as they want to push out. So it's. But I think what this does is it actually broadens that because it's not just about the audience you're reaching. What about the people that you aren't reaching yet. So as a discovery tool now, typically you're going to get lower engagement rates with completely new audiences, right? But you're still, you know, reaching. This is really about the targeting, otherwise you wouldn't reach.
- [10:03]
B
So what's happening here is that they, at the beginning, allow me to select some categories that I want to target at, and they were pretty basic, but from what I understand, they're improving the algorithm behind this that tries to get more people like your Followers and in those kind of crackers you've spoken about. So actually, from a value money point of view, if I was tweeting, I mean, I could probably tweet more and get more value from this. So the reality is the more you tweet, I'm not saying tweet millions of times, but you're going to get better value to be doing this stuff more regularly. And actually the quality of the traffic, looking at this, I'm getting more impressions, I'm getting more visibility, but I'm getting a similar, if not better ratio of engagement against my organic audience. So it is suggesting to me, I had really big concerns about this at the beginning because the targeting criteria seem pretty thin in terms of the amount of targeting options you had. But actually I'm getting good quality traffic. So if you've got the option to do this, I think this is worth testing out. It's a fixed monthly fee and it's what you make of it to some extent. If you do better quality content, you do tend to get really good quality engagement with it. So worth testing, worth testing out and.
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A
Really nice within the analytics that they split out, you know, promoted in campaigns with, with your organic.
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B
Yeah. So you can compare the two audiences and actually it looks, it looks pretty good. So a couple of analytics features that you've come across that you just wanted to mention.
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A
Yeah. So I can confess, I haven't looked at Twitter analytics for quite a while, clearly, because I hadn't spotted these. But if you go, if you go in, basically you've got your. When you go into analytics.twitter.com, just log into your Twitter account and you can see your own Twitter analytics. You have your homepage, which gives you a nice summary of your key metrics together with information on top tweets, top mentions, that kind of thing. You dig into tweets, which is the next tab along, and you get lovely little graph that shows you kind of daily engagement rates, which is really, really useful. And then you can dig into each individual tweet and look at promote, if it's been promoted, what it did there and what your top tweets were and stuff. You've then got audiences, which again, I've never really looked at. And the demographic information on this is really useful.
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B
Right.
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A
Because what it tells you gives you some really useful insights into who your Twitter audience is. Now, as a good marketer, why wouldn't you want to know that? Because actually you can begin to think, ah, maybe that explains why particular content does better in some areas. Than others. You can also get information on the lifestyle, consumer behavior, and I think the consumer behavior isn't available on all accounts. I was trying to dig into what triggers it or not. Whether it's a certain volume, we've certainly got it on your account. But actually, yeah, just getting that kind of demographic information which you have in all the other platforms is all there. And for the taking on Twitter now if you go over to the far right, you've got a more drop down menu and in there is a little nugget of gold. It's called Videos Bisa, so obviously still in beta, but I think they've rolled this out across most accounts. And if you've posted any videos onto Twitter, you get to see not only how many views those videos have, but also you get to see the completion rate.
- [13:01]
B
Yeah, so this is kind of like the stuff you get in YouTube where you can see how much of a video someone's actually watched. And this is really interesting little insight actually. So we've been posting videos, little clips of the podcast that were about a minute long, I think.
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A
Yeah, well, the tool allowed me for up to 60 seconds. And when you're editing this stuff down, it's. Oh no. By the time we've got a little kind of startup routine that we do on all of them and a little, little closure with the audio tag on it, kind of about a minute, 45 seconds to a minute was about how they were all ending up. And I was happily posting these out and they were getting quite good engagements and happy days, I thought, until I looked at the Twitter analytics.
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B
Yeah. So this is interesting, this is a good point that if you look at one stat, it doesn't always paint the complete picture. So we're posting these things, they're getting good levels of engagement.
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A
But what did we find? So we found that if I looked at it, most people weren't getting past 25% of the video.
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B
Right?
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A
Yeah. So if they're about a minute minute long, that means actually most of my audience, if they are choosing to engage with the video, are kind of dropping off after that, after that point. Basically it tells me.
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B
So 15 seconds.
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A
Yeah. Your videos are too long. You need to keep it, keep it.
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B
And you know this from previous things you've done. Eight, ten seconds was good.
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A
But sometimes, you know, like everybody, you see what you want to see. I was very happy, very proud of my one minute videos. I spent a lot of time crafting them and so obviously everybody was going to love them. No, Kieran, look at the data look at what the data tells you. So it's really great to go in and see this and you can see it across all of the videos that we've done. Some of them do slightly better than others. But rule of thumb, yeah, you're going to start seeing me post out much, much shorter, shorter videos. It is also interesting to see, you know, which ones people are actually engaging with and which they don't. You know, there is a little bit of variety on there and some of them actually I can see if you've like retweeted or reposted the video, which sometimes we do. The engagement level drops right off once you do that. So you see we've got one there on the message me which the first time we post that got 4.8% engagement rate and dropped to like 1% seconds I'm posting.
- [15:02]
B
But even so, I mean if you look at that, a 1% engagement rate is actually not shocking in terms of we've got a big enough audience that it's still kind of 30, 40 people, whatever that are engaging.
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A
When you go in number of people getting through was, was, was much, much lower. So the engagement level.
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B
But you'd expect that, I mean the reality is first time you post it, if you post it again, people might have seen it so they're less likely to engage and that's getting through to different people hopefully is the next stage. So another thing that you had to look at in the analytics was the tracking pixel. So explain the logic behind this.
- [15:32]
A
Yeah, so basically if you're advertising through Twitter, a lot of the time people will just go on their Google Analytics data, which primarily most of the reports in Google Analytics are last click orientated. So it'll be the last action people do that gets the credit for the sale. Now if I'm investing money within advertising program on something like Twitter, the chances are that a lot of the traction and that advertisement campaign will actually generate will come through first. Interaction is a great kind of discovery tool initially and I think that's how a lot of the campaigns tend, tend to work. People aren't at that fully engaged, ready to buy status when, when they're on Twitter and that are a little bit more kind of browsing around looking what's of interest. Right. So it's a problem for Twitter because actually if you just go on like a last click attribution report within Google Analytics, you'd go, well that was a big fat waste of time. But actually if you look at a broader attribution window, you get much better insight into what your campaign's actually generating.
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B
So we should say, I mean, Google Analytics, if you look at the multi channel funnels report, you can do a 90 day attribution window. But actually I know from our products and services it sometimes takes a year for people to make decisions. So actually you might want much longer than 90 days even as well.
- [16:48]
A
Yeah. So what Twitter have done is they've popped conversion tracking in and the conversion tracking they have. Basically you take the conversion tracking code and you place that on the page of your website. That shows that the conversions actually happened. Yeah. So it's not one of these things that goes on every single page, it's just going through to the pages where an actual conversion is taking place. In most cases that will be your thanks for signing up page or your thanks for your purchase page. But once you've got that in there, what you're able to do is to really play around with the kind of post engagement, post view kind of views and attribution windows. And I think that's really smart. It's good. If I'm making an investment within Twitter advertising, I need to get a much broader view of how this is working because in a lot of cases it's going to work on much more the same basis that perhaps a display advert might have, but it can be much, much, much more targeted to your audiences and they've got some quite smart tailor audience and remarketing tech within there.
- [17:51]
B
Fantastic. Okay, so the last thing I wanted to talk about with Twitter is something that essentially this is an artificial intelligence thing. And I think this is absolutely fascinating. This is something from IBM Watson. So if you're familiar, IBM Watson is IBM's, it's their artificial intelligence and they've allowed it and they've created it so it can now analyze text and tell you the kind of tone and the personality of that text. So what you can do with this is you can upload a body of text if you wanted to, and it will analyze it and tell you the kind of tone and things about the personality. But very interestingly, you can go through and you can analyze your own Twitter account.
- [18:32]
A
Wow.
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B
And what it will allow you to do is go through and kind of just tells you what he thinks the tone is. So if I just go through, I'm just doing this live as we speak now, and I'm getting it to analyze a Twitter account and it gives you some example celebrity ones as well. So I've gone through and I've taken this particular account, which in this particular case is The Pope's Twitter account. The Pope's Twitter account. The Pope's Twitter account. Okay. It's one of the ones they suggest. I haven't done this in any particular reason. And it says, okay, well there were in that Twitter account 35,000 words they could analyze. So they reckon this is a very strong analysis and it gives you a summary.
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A
He's really taking use of those two characters, isn't he?
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B
Exactly. And it says that you are likely to be influenced by family when making product purchases. So he's gonna listen to his family, apparently, and those people around him that he loves. He's very like to volunteer for social causes. Sounds like the Pope to me. He's likely to read entertainment magazines. I'm not sure that's his thing, but you know, what do I know?
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A
What does any self respecting pontiff do whilst traveling in the Popemobile?
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B
He's unlikely to have a gym members. He prefers style when buying clothes, doesn't really care. And he doesn't eat out frequently apparently. Now this sounds a bit silly when you're looking at it for the Pope, but actually let's read the summary. You're empathetic. You feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You're appreciative of art. You are driven and you have high goals for yourself. Your choices are driven by a desire for well being and well being of others. You consider tradition a large part of what you do. You highly respect the groups that you belong to and follow their guidance. You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in your life and you prefer activities with a purpose.
- [20:07]
A
He's in the right job.
- [20:08]
B
Well, there you go. Exactly right. So I think that the key point of this is that you can analyze your Twitter account and what it will do is it will tell you the tone of voice of that Twitter account and actually you can see if that matches with your brand tone. So I actually did this and it does match pretty well. We're pretty pleased that we've got our kind of tone right, but just check that and go through and analyze it. It's a clever example of artificial intelligence. We've been slightly light about our kind of interpretation of it, but actually it's a really good tool. So we'll put the link into the show notes as well. So Twitter still well and truly alive. Still some amazing things you can do there. It depends on your target audience, but check out some of the tools that are there that will help you out with it.
- [20:46]
A
Yeah, check them out. I was really quite surprised at what I'd been missing. Do you know what? Within the analytics I think one of the really exciting things you can do is export the data and start analyzing it within spreadsheets. And I' I'll post a link to a really great article I found on the subject. Had some really great suggestions as to how to analyze it within your spreadsheets.
- [21:06]
B
Fantastic. So good luck with all your Twitter efforts and we'll see you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
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A
Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free Benchmark Skills Test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date, just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.