#Newsmaker: What's happening on Twitter w/ Barry Collins

With the Soccer World Cup just around the corner, Collins shares some interesting stats about the football conversation on Twitter. “We know that as many as 90% of Twitter sports fans plan to watch the World Cup and that at the time, the last tournament became the most tweeted about event in history.”

Survey shows 86% of South Africans will watch Soccer World Cup

6 Jun 2018

More on this in the interview:

Briefly explain your role at Twitter.
I manage our global advertising partner business. My role is to ensure that the great range of Twitter products and services are available to our clients in countries where Twitter does not have a direct office. I have worked at Twitter for over five years and I love being part of a company that impacts the world every single day.

Bruce Daisley of Twitter on the power of amazing culture businesses (Part 1)

Jon Ratcliffe  5 Apr 2018

What other interesting insights can you provide into the upcoming World Cup?
Twitter is what’s happening in the world so every day you can see major events unfolding on the platform. Football is a huge passion for people on Twitter and with less than two weeks to go until the World Cup begins in Russia, that passion will be at its peak. Fans will turn to Twitter throughout the tournament to see the latest video clips and join the conversation.

Across key live entertainment and sporting events throughout the world, Twitter, on average, sees a +4.1% lift in unique visitors while other social platforms, in aggregate, see no significant change according to ComScore. The difference is even more pronounced with tentpole sports events. During the 2017 Super Bowl, Twitter saw a +19% lift in unique visitors (versus average Sunday traffic) while other social platforms, in aggregate, saw a decline in unique visitors.

What does this mean for Twitter; how does Twitter leverage such events?
Twitter is a mobile first and video platform that has experienced a 124% year-on-year growth in football video clips being shared. The reasons for that are clear. It is home to broadcasters, journalists, pundits, clubs and football fans.

There is no bigger sporting conversation on Twitter than the football conversation. We see that reflected across the world.

However, one of the best things about Twitter is that no matter what you are interested in, you can find it and we’re working hard to ensure that this content is at the top of your timeline. We continued to make it easier for people to follow topics, interests and events on Twitter. We've begun sharing curated timelines of Tweets around breaking news events in different parts of the app, including the home timeline and search results, to make it easier to find relevant news and the surrounding conversation.

This is the first step in a much more cohesive strategy around events that’s inclusive of both the conversation on Twitter and live video, and we’re continuing to experiment with ways to bring more personalised, relevant content to people across our product.

What is Twitter’s advertising strategy?
Every day, people come to Twitter to discover what’s happening around the world right now. This discovery mindset of global consumers on Twitter is unique. They’re engaged and curious, so brands can connect with an influential audience in real-time and at the most important moments worldwide. In fact, 82% of people actively engage with brands on Twitter, so South African brands have access to an incredibly valuable global audience.

We’ve had great success from promoted video as well – it’s our top revenue-generating ad format for the seventh consecutive quarter and now accounts for more than half of our ad revenue, and we expect that to grow in 2018.

And its growth strategy?
Twitter is growing. We saw our sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit daily active user growth and showed strong product innovation, and we continue to focus on driving usage of Twitter as a daily utility.

We continue to make Twitter easier to use with the launch of bookmarks and video timestamps, and we’re making it easier for people to follow topics, interests and events with new curated timelines around breaking news events across different parts of Twitter. We’ve seen great success with our Twitter Lite product in Africa and I think this will continue in 2018.

We also recently announced over 30 premium video shows which would be exclusively streaming on Twitter nearly doubling the number of programmes available. Programmes dedicated to topics like women empowerment and communities like Black Twitter were introduced to complement the rich conversation about these movements on the platform.

We're not guessing, we're listening. People tell us what they want to see with the conversations they share on Twitter. In the past year, we’ve really expanded our efforts with the best publishers and content creators in the world to bring a slate of programming that reflects those diverse content interests.

Comment on the current and future state of social media.
Audiences are becoming more elusive as people are cutting the cord. It is becoming more difficult to reach key audiences as they fragment, which is why we’re working to tailor the Twitter experience to show users the most relevant content.

The social media industry has also evolved into a place where each platform has a specific use case. Twitter is the network you use to see what’s happening in the world.

Still use Twitter? Here's how to get your chirp on!

Blue Juice  5 Jun 2018

What are some of the most recent product updates users should be aware of?


Apart from the product developments I have already outlined, we continue to expand our safety efforts. We have made more than 30 individual changes to our product, policies and operations between 2017 and 2018. We have increased our action rates tenfold. We have made significant changes to our reporting tools and continue to improve them as well as working to communicate more clearly with our users on reports and how we draft policy.