What Will Twitter Do Next?

Today, Twitter has announced further creations to both its marketing adaptability and its extension into the music market. It has only been two days since Twitter unveiled its keyword-targeting capability for advertisers (April 17). This means that marketers can now target users by keywords based on users’ recent tweets in addition to the already available ‘geolocation’, mobile device and interest filters, (Shields, Marketing Week, 2013). He gives the example of a soft drinks company, who instead of using Twitter’s existing targeting tools such as the ‘hashtag’ in finding key words; could simple search for any users that has recently tweeted the words ‘I’m thirsty”.

Chapman (2013) stated in today’s Marketing magazine how Sky used Twitter’s brand new keyword targeting feature to invite people who were tweeting about the derby between Manchester City and Manchester United to watch the game live on Now TV. Alongside keyword targeting, Kevin Weil discussed how Twitter was now able to profile users’ interest based on people following other users from a certain field of interest, such as cycling.

Weil said: "Interest targeting has been incredibly powerful for us. Follows that are unrequited provide us an amazing view into who you are and what you are interested in." He continued in stating how Twitter can now do a form of ‘gender-targeting’,  even though Twitter do not ask this question when a user signs up.

Yet another creation that is being developed by Twitter is their own music app which launched for Apple iPhone users yesterday. The managing director of Twitter UK, Tony Wang has stated that the version for the android app is currently being developed. The app contains a feature whereby it will display the ‘140 most tweeted about songs of the moment.’ This has come from the fact that he claims that, "Music is at the heartbeat of Twitter – there is no bigger passion category on Twitter than music today". Twitter also claims that 50% of all users supposedly follow at least one music act and that an astounding 50% of all tweets are music related.

In an analysis of this information, it would seem that Twitter are progressing further as a social networking site daily; the only problem is, it is at the expense of users and the way in which privacy is also being reduced daily. The approach to keyword targeting is very similar to the Google’s AdWords platform, and it has been argued by many that Facebook and Twitter pose more of a potential threat to ‘Google’s towering dominance in the search market than the ‘search alliance’ pairing of Bing and Yahoo,’ (Shields, 2013). There has been a critique from Microsoft as they claim that these sorts of techniques in marketing are further adding to market plurality.

Furthermore, Twitter’s new music app could be great in giving some bands a chance to show their material to users who may not have listened to their music before but since music acts like One Direction and Justin Beiber are the most ‘tweeted’ about music acts, then the dominance of that ‘top 140 songs list’ will be with them. To conclude, it has recently been said that Twitter is merely a Public Relations platform and it reduces communication to superficialities and lacks depth; but it seems to be adapting very quickly to market conditions and has the positive of interacting between users at an arguably quicker pace than Facebook.