There are a number of things that you can do to optimize Twitter that many people don’t really think about when they set out. These things may seem really minute, but actually will have a tremendous impact on your Twitter experience, and how well it works for your business.

When you are putting together your Twitter in the first place, do not neglect those initial steps and skip forward in favor of getting things going in a faster way. Take the time to choose a great profile photo that is tasteful yet eye catching. The company logo or a good shot of the CEO are always great ideas.

Make sure that you do fully fill out the profile. A decent introduction to your company is best, keep it short, sweet and make sure that it is well written and clear.

Remember that Twitter is still yet another facet of social networking, and use it as such. Though it is a much briefer platform to announce things- bear in mind that you are again, connecting with those who want to know more about your products and services. Treat it very much like any other social networking platform- and be social. Retweet things that you find interesting, post the occasional photo, announce Twitter only deals and incentives- these are just a few of the ways you can get your Twitter feed really buzzing.

Having said that, pay attention to your following to followers ratio. If you are following more than are following you, pare that down so that it is either a higher “followers” number, or fairly even.

Bringing Twitter into your social media marketing plan is always a good idea, but it is not without effort. Take the time to not only set your Twitter up in an appealing way, but also to interact with those who follow you.

This is a guest post by Dario Ruff, CEO and Founder of Avenue180 LLC., a search marketing agency based in Atlanta, GA. Dario has helped clients like NBC Universal, Office Depot, MTV, Trane Residential & Commercial and H&R Block navigate and engage their target audiences across the ever-changing digital landscape. Fort Myers web design also contributed to this article.

Editor’s note: Brand dollars are still the biggest unclaimed prize on the interent. Guest author Steven Carpenter handicaps the players who are most likely to get them.

One of the biggest business opportunities in the consumer Internet space is to create products and services that attract a share of the billions of dollars in held-up brand marketing that has yet to find its way onto the web. With the explosion of various kinds of content and the innovative ways advertisers can segment and track users, why are marketers so reluctant to open up the floodgates? Quite simply, because the current online solutions—search, lead generation, display, video—do not provide a high enough return for these kinds of categories and are not consistent with the image these brands have invested so heavily to achieve.

Commensurate with the potential riches, there is an enormous amount of startup energy and experimentation going on in this area. In this installment of the TechCrunch Teardown, I will look at the four leaders—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon—and how their new interactions—“like”, “follow”, “friend/check-in”, “group coupon”—are fairing with brand advertisers.

The $20 Billion Opportunity

According to Ad Age, the Top 100 Global Advertisers spent over $100 billion in 2009 across the various print, television, radio, outdoor, and Internet channels; based on data from the previous year, 39 of the 100 had budgets of $1 billion or more (see table 1, click to enlarge). Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of 50 leading brands (such as Tide, Dawn, Pampers, Gillette, and Crest), of which 23 generate $1 billion or more in sales, is the world’s largest advertiser, spending close to $9 billion annually. It should follow, then, that the Internet economy as a whole is effected by how the brand managers at these companies decide to allocate their funds online.

As you can see from the last column in the table at right, the leading marketers are only spending $1.8 billion, or 2.6% of their total budgets, online, despite the fact that consumers are spending close to 30% of their time on the Internet. Of the top marketers, only General Motors, Disney, Bank of America, and News Corp. allocated more than $100 million to the web.

So who has found the best marketing value online? Companies that market and sell financial services, insurance, automotive, communications and media, and consumer technology. It makes sense: these are companies with products that can be found easily using search, and whose customers are most likely to be acquired online because they can transact online. To date, Google and vertical content sites such as Yahoo! Finance and Bankrate have been the largest benefactors of these re-allocated dollars.

New Kleiner Perkins partner, and former Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker, estimates that closing the gap between consumer attention and ad dollars spent on the Internet to be a $50 billion global opportunity. If the Top 100 marketers bring their marketing budgets in alignment with 30% of time spent, I estimate online brand marketing to be a $30 billion global opportunity and $20 billion in the U.S. As evidenced by Google’s recent pursuit of Groupon, its traditional CPC and display advertising may not be sufficient enough to meet these marketers’ needs.

The Four Horsemen

There are four Internet companies currently best positioned to work with brands to create innovative marketing solutions that will appeal to millions of consumers—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon. I acknowledge it is not exactly a fair comparison for two main reasons: 1) Facebook has enjoyed a 3-4 year head start on the field and 2) each product has a different use case and thus attracts a different audience with distinct revenue opportunities. Each company, though, has found its way into the mainstream and now finds itself with an attractive platform for brand experimentation.

I see the four product experiences these companies offer on a continuum of online-to-offline interaction on one axis, and requiring passive-to-active behavior on the other. The Facebook experience, for example, is largely an online one where a user can say something about herself by associating with a particular brand by “liking” it. This is an incredibly passive expression that requires a split-second action with little to no long-term repercussions. She can choose to visit the brand page and see the news feed at her convenience.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a personal tool for gathering realtime information—no one knows which feeds the consumer decides to consume or to ignore. While Twitter is similar to Facebook in its largely online-focused consumption, it is a much more “active” medium. Users are constantly reminded when they are following a brands’ information stream. As soon as the information becomes unimportant, too frequent, or spammy, she will simply cut off the connection.

Groupon (which I wrote about in an earlier teardown) is the lightest application, ironically, even though it is the only one of the four that requires a user to make a purchasing decision. Transactions occur easily online and the offline experience of presenting a coupon is consistent with decades of proven user behavior.

As of now, Foursquare asks the most of its users in relation to branded campaigns, but it is also the closest of the four to placing customers in the physical proximity of brands and retailers.

How They Are Doing

You can see how the four different interactions 1) naturally lend themselves to different brands and 2) exhibit a large disparity in terms of the sheer number of participants. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: 44,000 passionate luxury fashionistas at NY Fashion Week may be more valuable to Yves Saint Laurent than 5 million fans on Facebook.

It should come as no surprise that the biggest brand in the entire social ecosystem is Coca-Cola with 20 million Facebook Fans. Whole Foods is the biggest brand on Twitter with 1.8 million followers and the Gap, having sold 440,000 half-off coupons using Groupon, is that startup’s largest brand experiment.

Of the top 50 pages on Facebook, 8 of them are leading advertisers and brands, compared to Twitter which doesn’t have a single brand in its top 50 users. Of Facebook’s top 50 brand pages, 31 of them are food and beverage companies, while 11 are consumer products such as Converse All-Stars and Victoria’s Secret. The most important takeaway is that brands have a far greater following on Facebook than they do on their own sites. Facebook’s best move has been to convince brands to market their Facebook pages rather than driving traffic to their own websites.

The most interesting finding is that what seems to be popular on Facebook is not so on Twitter. If you click on the table at right an dlook at the top 50 brands on Facebook, the “Follower/Fan Ratio” (the result of dividing the number of Twitter followers to Facebook fans) does not get higher than 8% (Disney). This indicates that Twitter might have a more difficult time than Facebook in attracting overall brand dollars with its current product feature set.

This is evident when you look in detail at one CPG company and its portfolio of brands. I did a comparison of the differing success of P&G’s top brands using the two platforms (click on table at right to enlarge). In every case except one (Dawn), the branded experience on Facebook is more popular in terms of numbers than on Twitter. In a few cases, there does not appear to be a reason for even having a Twitter presence. It is interesting to note that the most followed P&G Twitter account is the company’s own corporate PR team.

Facebook still has a lot of work to do and it is far from a foregone conclusion that it has won. While the lightness of its interaction makes getting to scale easier, maintaining enough valuable interactions on the branded pages and engaging long-term customer interest is a huge challenge. For example, according to eMarketer, nearly 1/3 of Facebook users who unsubscribed from a branded page simply were no longer interested in it. And, more to the point, simply because Coke has 20 million Fans does not necessarily mean Coke will pay for the privilege to advertise on Facebook if it cannot see a return.

So what brands seem to be working well on Twitter and far better than on Facebook? Daily deals, such as Dell Outlet, Amazon, and Woot, and companies that place customer service and community at the heart of the brand experience, like Zappos and Etsy, exhibit the most lopsided Follower/Friend ratio. It is important to note that two companies that had horrific customer service challenges over the past few years—JetBlue and Toyota—have fully embraced Twitter as a direct communications channel. The biggest driver of Twitter success as compared to Facebook is the timeliness of the information.

Twitter, then, is well positioned to capture marketing dollars from companies optimizing for deals, retailers that have frequent specials, ticketing and events, movie studios, television shows, last minute deals, airlines, and hotels.

It is still early days for both Foursquare and Groupon in terms of working with big brands. Foursquare has seen traction with high-end luxury and media brands, likely as a result of its headquarters being located in New York and early media partnerships. Of course, Foursquare’s long-term viability as a stand-alone “check-in” company is still an open question with Facebook Places breathing down its neck. This is a strategic move on Facebook’s part to get closer to offline actions, transactions, and local commerce.

While Groupon is the defining company of next-generation e-commerce, it has a tougher road in terms of working with brands and large retailers. These companies tend to be more sensitive to heavy discounting as they don’t want to train their customers to wait for 50%-off coupons. And, they don’t like to be so indiscriminate with their offers.

Overall Assessment

I evaluated the four companies along the six different types of offers and campaigns that I can see consumer brands wanting to engage in:

• Coupons: Simple discount off purchases
• Location: Physical check-in or product scan
• Loyalty: Frequency, “Mayorship
• Time-based
• Special Events: VIP’s
• Inventory Close-Outs

Based on my research, while Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon are the best positioned to capture the estimated $20 billion in pent-up consumer marketing dollars, none of the four are currently optimized to execute along all of the necessary dimensions. There are considerable opportunities for startups to innovate and capture share. I look for this to be one of the most attractive areas for entrepreneurs in the consumer internet for years to come.

Bugatti teardown photo credit: Flickr/David Villarreal Fernández

TC Teardown: Who Is Best Positioned To Win The $20 Billion Brand Advertising Prize?

Morrigan’s Madness – Changes and Updates (from the Madness world)

Do you use Facebook? Do you use Twitter? Well then here’s SmartTwitter. You’re welcome.

Yes it’s true that Twitter already has its own clunky status updating app on Facebook and there are plenty of apps that do this, like Tweeter.

But what sets SmartTwitter apart, aside from its simplicity of use, is the fact that Twitter language kruft like hashtags, retweets, @replies and @mentions look so out of place on Facebook that many people end up disabling these apps to stop the Twitter jargon from appearing in their feed and annoying their non-Twitter using friends.

Built by Michael Hoisie in one weekend using the GO programming language and Redis, the app currently has over 90,000 users. As easy and effective as it is to use (interface below) I wouldn’t be surprised if that number hits 100K by the end of this month.

Froms Hoise, on his motivation for building the app:

“Smart Twitter was written out of the frustration with the existing Twitter-to-Facebook apps. They either copied everything, or required an arbitrary hashtag to post updates. It should be possible for a computer to figure out which Tweets should be copied to Facebook and which ones should remain on Twitter.”

And so it was. Also, I no longer have to visit Facebook.

Via: HN

SmartTwitter Posts Your Tweets On Facebook, Minus The Noise

I thought Twitter had been awfully quiet for a Friday night. It turns out that @replies appear to be very broken at the moment — and have been for a couple of hours now. Hip hop artist Soulja Boy has just confirmed the problem to his 2.5 million followers. “Show me my @replies @twitter !!!,” Boy tweets.

Neither the Twitter Status blog nor the official Twitter account seem to acknowledge this problem which makes Twitter almost useless. If you can’t communicate with people, you’re just communicating at them. The work-around hack, of course, is to do a manual search for your Twitter username, and you’ll see what you’re missing.

Hundreds of tweets each minute show that the crowd has sourced the problem. And it appears to affect twitter.com as well as all the clients. Help us Twitter, we need to know what people are saying about us! And so does Soulja Boy!

Update: Twitter is aware of the problem and is working on it. They have a status update on their Status Blog — but now Tumblr (which hosts it) is down.

Show Soulja Boy His @Replies, Twitter! (And The Rest Of Us Too)

As you may have heard by now, Twitter has a new CEO. Former COO Dick Costolo is taking over from Evan Williams as the head of the company. A few minutes ago, I got a chance to speak to both of them about the change.

“New Twitter was definitely a trigger for this,” Williams told me. “Conveniently, I took over the CEO role just about two years ago — and brought Dick in just about a year ago. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a product guy, and New Twitter seems to work out well,” he continued. “New Twitter was a moment of clarity for all of us here,” Costolo added. “[With this change] Ev can once again focus on product.“

Costolo said that the company has no plans to put someone in the COO postion to replace him. “We have the management team we need,” he said. Williams, meanwhile, will move to focus on product. When I asked what this meant for current VP of Product Jason Goldman, Williams made it very clear that he will retain that position and the two will work alongside one another. “We’ve been working together for 8 years and have a very symbiotic relationship,” Williams noted. “I’m all about vision, he’s all about execution,” he continued.

More specifically, both Goldman and VP of Engineering Michael Abbott will now be reporting to Costolo to make sure all of Twitter’s execution is in order going forward.

“We’re entering what feels like a new phase,” Williams said. “The company is now at 300 people and revenue is coming in,” he continued. When I asked how much the drive to make money plays into this switch, Costolo sidestepped it a bit. “In the broader context, we’ve accomplished all this stuff. We were at 1 million tweets per day when Ev took over, now we’re at 90 million tweets per day. We’ve got this revenue engine now,” he said. He again reiterated that this move was more about letting Williams focus on product strategy.

Normally, when a company has three different CEOs in three years, it’s a very bad sign. But in Twitter’s case, this does seem to be more about a rapidly-growing company making sure they have the pieces in place for a continued explosion of growth. And yes, a big piece of that is the need to make money. The other piece is

Yesterday, Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian presented a number of new stats about the microblogging service as part of a recruiting talk at UC Berkeley. One interesting stat involves the number of API calls that the site is seeing: Krikorian says that Twitter is seeing 6 billion API calls per day, or 70,000 per second. That’s more than double the amount (3 billion API calls) that Twitter was seeing in April, according to the Programmable Web.

Some of the stats, including the fact that Twitter is seeing 90 million Tweets per day, we heard at Twitter’s news event this past week. Krikorian delved into the amount of data storage each Tweet includes in terms of text (200 bytes for 140 characters). Twitter is seeing 800 Tweets per second, or 12GBs of Twitter text. And Twitter generates 8 terabytes of data per day (or 80 MB per second), whereas the New York Stock Exchange creates 1 terabyte of data per day.

In his slides, Krikorian says Twitter’s 150 million users generate 1000 Tweets per second, and that Twitter eventually wants to be able to support half the world’s population and all of their devices (5 billion people and 6 billion devices, according to Krikorian). Challenges for the network, says Krikorian, include indexing, search, analytics, storage, scalability and efficiency.

Twitter had a considerable amount of downtime over the summer due to record usage because of the World Cup, and was forced to cut API limits on Tweet read requests. Krikorian presented a nifty slide in his presentation that shows the usage of Twitter by World Cup games (embedded below).

As we wrote earlier this week, while the number of API calls from clients are increasing, traffic to Twitter is increasing as well. Co-founder Ev Williams told press that traffic to Twitter.com has grown about 100% this year; and with a shiny new interface, I’d expect traffic to continue to surge.

The stats regarding the growth in API calls are somewhat ironic considering Twitter’s recent upgrades to its platform and what this could mean for developers. Unfortunately, as more and more users flock to a newer, more feature-filled (i.e. inline photos and videos; mobile apps) Twitter for interactions, developers that provide these features (and whose clients are contributing to these massive number of API calls per day) are probably going to lose traffic.

Twitter Seeing 6 Billion API Calls Per Day, 70K Per Second

While the new design of Twitter.com itself is big news, just as big is what it means for the Twitter ecosystem. I’m not talking about the third-party clients that have similar features to the ones Twitter just rolled out, but rather the partners that Twitter is (or is not) working with to bring more content directly into their environment.

Specifically, I’m talking about Twitter’s initial 16 partners:

Online brokerage firm Zecco is one of the participants in Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program – currently in beta – and this morning announced that the ad platform has proven to be very effective for the company to date.

The company says it sampled 50 Promoted Tweets over the past two months and measured their effectiveness, seeing a 50% increase in engagement on average as compared to regular messages posted on Zecco’s Twitter account.

Some of the tweets, which are centered around financial market commentary and new product offerings, even saw a 200% to 300% increase in engagement, the company adds.

Twitter launched Promoted Tweets last April, much to the chagrin of users initially. Basically, the system allows advertisers – only a handful of companies participate in the beta program today – to purchase keywords and select tweets that will appear on top of Twitter Search results for said terms.

Zecco says it plans to use the Promoted Tweets platform to share investment-focused resources, as well as real-time intelligence from the ZeccoShare community, such as “most traded” alerts to make investors aware of new opportunities.

Last April, Zecco announced Zap Trade, a plug-in trading experience for the web, enabling investors to place trades directly from top finance and investing websites. StockTwits, a Twitter-powered financial community, partnered with Zecco to embed the technology into the StockTwits website to allow investors to place trades with Zecco Trading and get real-time quotes directly through the website.

Promoted Tweets Are Super Effective, Advertiser Says

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/promoted-tweets-are-super-effective-advertiser-says/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/it%e2%80%99s-alive-taking-android%e2%80%99s-app-inventor-for-a-spin/ http://www.invisionskins.net/it%e2%80%99s-alive-taking-android%e2%80%99s-app-inventor-for-a-spin/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:25:29 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/it%e2%80%99s-alive-taking-android%e2%80%99s-app-inventor-for-a-spin/

By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s App Inventor for Android, a web-based development environment that’s meant to make it possible for non-developers to build their own Android applications. The technology has been in testing for a year, primarily with educational organizations, and may well be a boon for the Android ecosystem as students are introduced to the platform in the classroom. A report in the New York Times quotes project lead (and MIT professor) Harold Abelson as saying “These aren’t the slickest applications in the world… but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.” So does this mean Android’s millions of users are about to start programming for their own devices? Not quite.

I spent around 90 minutes this morning cranking away on a few test applications in App Inventor, and while I’m very excited about it, this is not going to be a walk in the park for “ordinary people”. Unless you’re looking to make an extremely basic application — think “Hello World” — you’re going to have to read through the documentation, and in some cases even the existing tutorials won’t be enough. That said, this will be absolutely perfect for the classroom environment for which it’s been tested in. The learning curve is not trivial, but this isn’t something that will take years to master, either.

Before I relay my experience, it’s worth giving a little context regarding my own programming background (or lack thereof). In high school I took a year of Visual Basic, which App Inventor reminds me of in a few ways, and I later took a couple of classes on C++, which hasn’t come into play at all here. I’ve never used Scratch, which App Inventor shares many similarities with. I’d consider myself far less experienced than any professional developer, but I’m probably more knowledgeable than your average Android user.

Getting started on App Inventor is easy relative to installing Eclipse and the Android SDK, but it’s still a bit involved. First you need to ensure that you’ve got the proper version of Java running; next, you install a client for your OS; then you have to change a few settings on your Android phone (allow for applications installed from Unknown Sources, enable Dev mode on the phone, etc.). Plug in the phone, log-in to App Inventor, allow the Java app to run, and you should be good to go. It may sound like a lot, but the whole process won’t take more than ten minutes if you know what you’re doing.

Once you’re off and running, you’ll find that App Inventor is broken into two parts: the Designer and the Blocks Editor. The documentation does a good job explaining the differences, but the gist is that you add components like buttons and text fields and adjust the layout of your application in the Designer (which is a web page), and do the actual drag-and-drop coding in the Blocks Editor (which is a Java app). You can deploy changes to your Android device, hooked to your computer via USB, in less than a minute.

My first (admittedly overambitious) idea was to create an application that would allow a user to monitor TechCrunch headlines for keywords, which could come in handy if a startup wanted to get notified whenever we wrote a post about them. The basic layout was easy enough — I dragged a text box, a label, and a button to the design canvas, then tweaked the width and layout settings to make it look slightly less ugly. Then came the hard part: making those buttons actually do things, which marked my first introduction to the Blocks Editor.

The Blocks Editor reminds me of Apple’s Automator in that it lets you map out your app logic like a puzzle, though the former is obviously much more complex. Getting App Inventor to do what you want is sometimes very easy, assuming it already has a component for that task. Want to store the contents of a text field to a database when the user taps a button? It’s a cinch. Unfortunately, the list of available components sometimes has some frustrating omissions, which I quickly ran into.

Look (For The Right Components) Before You Leap

I initially planned to monitor TechCrunch headlines in my app using an RSS feed, which I assumed would be one of the available components. No dice — as far as I can tell there isn’t any RSS functionality baked in. However, the App Inventor does have some built-in Twitter components, including a search function — perhaps I could simply monitor the TechCrunch Twitter feed for headlines and run the user query against that? After dragging and dropping the proper components into to place (which took all of two minutes), I had the application spitting out Twitter search results for whatever query the user entered, which was very cool. But it’s trickier to monitor an individual Twitter account (I was getting results from all of Twitter), and it was quickly becoming apparent that I didn’t have enough experience with App Inventor to pull this project off. I’ve shelved it for later. Update:Looks like I could have used the join block to add the query and “from:techcrunch” to the search.

My second attempt was to build an application I’ll call Draw N’ Send. Given my initial setback, the application was to be nearly identical to the one produced with the App Inventor PaintPot tutorial, which allows the user to draw with a few colors on a blank canvas (I hoped to add the ability to email the resulting drawing via email). Things got off to a great start, as they often do when you have a step-by-step guide: I quickly got my colored buttons into place, and getting dots and lines to appear on the Canvas when the user dragged their finger on the screen was surprisingly straightforward. With the basic drawing functionality in place, I got ready to set up my email functionality. Which is when I hit roadblock number two: for some reason there’s currently no component to save the contents of a canvas to an image file, so I had nothing to email. So much for that idea.

Outlook

All of which boils down to say a few things. First, while this may be a development environment “for anyone”, it’s still one that you definitely have to learn before it becomes useful. And that is going to be a bit tricky, as there aren’t a ton of tutorials available yet (if you’re looking for more, check out USF Professor Dave Wolber’s Appinventor.org, which isn’t affiliated with Google).

The other key takeaway is that the variety of components offered in App Inventor still has a ways to go — and if the component you need isn’t there, you’re probably out of luck. Google says they’re working to add new ones, and down the line the Component Developer Kit will probably lead to a huge jump in available functionality. But for now, it’s definitely a good idea to get familiar with the available Functions before you start putting everything together. Whoops.

CrunchBase Information

Android

Information provided by CrunchBase

It’s Alive! Taking Android’s App Inventor For A Spin

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