PR and Marketing Social Medial

For marketers wooing social media users amid a bombardment of competing messages, Twitter has a solution. On Tuesday (February 2016), the social platform unveiled an advertising feature that enables marketers to upload a video ad and then jump to the front of the line, getting featured in Twitter’s app and its website for 24 hours. The feature is currently available to select marketers in the United States but will become available globally in the future.

Twitter explained how the new feature—called “First View”—works, via a blog post: First View helps marketers achieve significant audience reach with exclusive ownership of Twitter’s most valuable advertising real estate for a 24-hour period. When users first visit the Twitter app or log in to twitter.com, the top ad slot in the timelines will be a Promoted Video from that brand. Now, marketers can tell a powerful visual story across the Twitter audience.

That Twitter is catering to marketers is no surprise; the social media platform’s advertising business is booming In 2015’s fourth quarter, Twitter grabbed $641 million from marketers—a 48 percent increase year over year. Mobile marketing accounted for 86 percent of ad revenue. However, the outlook isn’t all sunshine and roses for Twitter. It continues to struggle to retain users—a crucial element in keeping marketers interested in its platform

Advertising Age Twitter brought many people to its platform in the last quarter of 2015, user growth is either stagnant or dropping: In the fourth quarter of 2015, Twitter attracted 320 million people to check out its service each month on average. Even though that’s about one-fifth of Facebook’s monthly audience size, it’s still a lot of people, 9% more than had checked out Twitter each month in the fourth quarter of 2014. Problem is, 320 million monthly active users is the same amount of people that checked out Twitter each month during the previous quarter. That is to say, the size of Twitter’s audience didn’t grow in the fourth quarter.

Advertising Age also reported that when you subtract roughly 15 million—the amount of people without Twitter accounts who follow certain profiles exclusively via text messaging—“Twitter actually lost 2 million people from its monthly audience in the fourth quarter

Facebook captions video ads Twitter isn’t the only social media platform to offer new features for marketers. Facebook revealed that 80 percent of users react negatively when videos start to play loudly in their timelines—and end up blaming both Facebook and the brand behind the video. However, Facebook reported that 41 percent of videos are meaningless without sound. To combat negativity but still give video marketing context, Facebook announced that it will start to automatically caption video ads. Advertising Age reported that the feature will roll out to U.S. and Canadian users using English ads. Marketers can add captions of their own.