The microblogging service Twitter has been long trying to tell that its audience its a lot larger than its user base. But to appeal to investors, Twitter has to do more than that saying, and should prove more statistics to it.
On February 3rd, 2015, the microblogging service announced its first venture into making money from people who see tweets outside Twitter.
As a way to get more revenue from its simple-looking but complex advertising campaign, Twitter said it's starting to sell its advertising product - called the Promoted Tweet - to people outside its service.
The company has signed a deal with news-reading app Flipboard and Yahoo! Japan, giving advertisers the power to reach more people.
"For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," said Twitter's Senior Product Director Ameet Ranadive in the company's blog post.
The new advertisement-selling initiative could be the needed strategy for Twitter that is having an ongoing concerns about its slowing user growth rate.
Twitter's tweet can flow seamlessly from one medium to another, this makes Twitter unique from other social media. According to the company, there were about 185 billion unique views of tweets outside of Twitter's own website and app in the three months through September 2014. And because of that, Twitter is optimists that delivering Promoted Tweets outside of Twitter should appeal to many people, from Twitter's users and non-users, advertisers, to investors.
Thousands of web and mobile applications already syndicate tweets to their service to create compelling content experiences. Combining that with the flexibility and control of a Promoted Tweet, marketers can have an almost limitless capacity to create large-scale, rich and well-targeted advertising campaigns across a many platforms.
This in turn can make a promising result in sales, traffic and revenue.
By partnering with Twitter, media companies can also earn ad dollars. Flipboard which already sells its own fullscreen ads, said that Twitter's Promoted Tweets will appear in a dedicated part of its app where user's Twitter content is shown.
"The biggest thing we get out of it is for the first time getting access to promoted tweets," said Flipboard's Chief Technology Officer Eric Feng. "It's been performing incredibly well so for us to have access to that unit inside of Flipboard is incredibly powerful in terms of expanding our monetization capabilities inside of our app."
To boost tweet's visibility, Twitter is not just partnering with media companies. Twitter signed a deal with Google to make its tweets more searchable online. Because the influence of search engines, notably Google, is still on of the most powerful medium on the internet. partnering with Google will make tweets more visible to more people.
Google previously had to crawl Twitter for the information. The partnership will make tweets become searchable and appear on the search result as soon as they're posted.
Further reading: Twitter, Promoted Tweets and Advertisements
Quick Promote for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
The next day, on February 4th, Twitter revealed a new feature - Quick Promote - that allow users to select their most popular tweets and pay to boost them directly from the analytics dashboard. Promoting a Tweet takes just a few clicks and your Tweet will automatically be targeted to users who have interests similar to your followers - the audience that is most likely to be interested in your message.
This feature is created for a faster and easier way for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to get their best content in front of more people on Twitter.
"We found that users who see a relevant Promoted Tweet from an SMB are also 32 percent more likely to visit that business," wrote Twitter's Product Manager Buster Benson in a blog post.
Revenue Grows, User Stagnates
On its quarterly report, Twitter's user growth was a disappointment but its revenue growth was a surprise as its shares went up 11 percent, delivering a 97 percent jump in revenue to $479 million.
Twitter's user growth nearly halted in the fourth quarter. The company said it gained a total of 4 million users in the period, giving it 288 million at the end of 2014. This marks the lowest record for the company, and for the first time fell below Facebook's user growth.
Despite the poor performance in user growth, Twitter's shares went up $4.04, pricing it at $45.30 in after-hours trading.
After Twitter's one year IPO, CEO Dick Costolo is facing intense scrutiny as his recently revamped leadership team works to show investors that they still have ways to reinvigorate user growth and generate the kind of revenue that matches the platform's massive cultural influence, justifying its market value of $26 billion.
