Today it was reported that Britain has hit 10 million twitter users – that makes us the fourth most obsessed nation behind the US, Brazil and Japan! 80% of us use the site on our mobiles

Twitter was 6 years old in March and has impressive statistics:

• Over 140 million active users worldwide as of 2012
• Generating over 340 million tweets daily
• Handling 1.6 billion search queries per day

It’s just a shame it doesn’t make any money! It generated revenue of $45 million in 2010 and operated at a loss. As a business model that’s not great but lets face it Google started in 1996 and for the first few years they didn’t make any money and didn’t even know how they were going to. They thought if they focused on providing the best search experience on the web the money would follow and guess what…they were right! In 2010 Google was valued at $163.2 billion

So what’s the plan for Twitter and how will it affect the user experience:

• Twitter Brand Pages – Companies that spend at least $25,000 are allowed to have their own Twitter brand page which includes a long banner across the top to advertise their products and prioritisation of their tweets on the page to ensure the most important ones stay at the top
• Promoted trends – These ads are integrated into the trending topic section where all the viral twittering takes place. Promoted trends will appear at the top of the page with the aim of getting people talking and engaging with the ad
• Promoted accounts – These are what you see when Twitter promotes accounts for you to follow, the closest people get to paying for more followers, you can even target Countries or locations where you want to attract followers
• Promoted tweets – These can be added to a users search, time line or geo location. They are being used in the American 2012 political campaign by Mitt Romney & Barack Obama to communicate key messages, for the advertiser the deal is pay per click, you only pay if users engage by clicking a relevant link

Is it working? Well they generated $139.5 million in advertising sales in 2011 are forecasting an 86.3% growth in 2012 to $259.9 million. Reports suggest the average price to promote a tweet or a trend for a day is £20,000.

They attempted advertising last year when the quick bar was introduced, it wasn’t a success! It was seen as intrusive with a bar hovering at the top of the screen scrolling advertising messages, it lasted a month! Promoted tweets seem to be settling in much better as Twitter promises it will only display the promoted tweets in the timeline when they are ‘relevant’ and they will flow as users scroll down their timelines not scream out at you! They were launched in March and reports suggest revenue of £3 million in the first couple of months.

What do you think? Has it affected your experience? As a daily Twitter user I’m glad to say it isn’t affected mine, in fact if I’m honest I didn’t even realise it was happening until I read a couple of articles in the last couple of days have they found a way to strike the balance between creating a viable business while keeping their customers happy?

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