Twitter Updates: What’s Hot In 2015

Twitter Adds “While You Were Away” Feature

For those of us who do not have our phones permanently attached to our hips,  but want to constantly be in the know, Twitter just released the new “while you were away” feature, which gives you the ability to never miss a beat. This feature will not only be used to help Twitter with user retention, but will fill in the gaps for people on the go.

The new functionality plays a small role in substituting the customary chronological list of tweets, now allowing users to view popular tweets that may have been missed while sleeping or being away from the social platform. Starting today, Twitter users on iOS have this feature readily available, with Android and twitter.com coming soon.

The tweets displayed under “while you were away” are ranked based off of the people you follow and the level of engagement, along with “other” factors. Product manager Paul Rosania wrote “Our goal is to help you keep up – or catch up – with your world, no matter how much time you spend on Twitter,” in a blog  , announcing the change. “With a few improvements to the home timeline we think we can do a better job of delivering on that promise without compromising the real time nature of Twitter.”

There has been a bit of controversy around this feature, with some users applauding the new ordering of tweets, with other worried about changing the uniqueness of the platform. For the people that are constantly scrolling through their news feeds, this will not make much of a difference, if any at all.

Twitter Advertising Changes

It has been more than four years since Twitter introduced advertising on its platform, which has consequently, changed the way businesses advertise online. The rules have shifted, requiring the players to adapt and develop new and creative strategies.

Twitter dominates the space when it comes to real-time marketing, which plays in their favor with breaking news, events and trends. Users refer to the platform for what’s happening in the moment.

Advertising on Twitter is no longer all about basing performance on one single objective, whether it be retweets, favorites, conversions, website visits, app installs etc… Now Twitter charges advertisers only when their ads produce the objectives they have set, enabling brands and businesses to design their ads more purposefully.

While the new payment model does make Twitter more expensive than other social platforms like Facebook (which works off of a cost per action, click-through-rate, or cost per thousand impressions), it also ensures little to no wasted spend.

According to Twitter’s third quarterly results, there were 284 million average monthly users on the site as of September 30, 2014. Their research also showed that the most effective ads are relatively short and use images or videos. With the platform’s upcoming auto-play ad preview feature, we anticipate this to generate as much hype as Facebook’s auto-playing video ads and YouTube’s pay-for-plays, because Twitter is combining the features into one video ad product. According to   Age, this feature has the ability to making promoted videos automatically play 6-second previews when they pop up in people’s news feeds.

Twitter Ads: Building The Largest Audience In The World

According to Tech times, Twitter recently unveiled its plans to investors on how it will reach its goal to “build the largest daily audience in the world.” These plans also include publishing advertisements outside the Twitter platform. Will this work? We will simply just have to wait and see.

The Wall Street Journal   that Twitter will roll out advertisements to tweet streams published on third-party apps and websites. It was also mentioned that Twitter and ESPN have been participating in negotiations, but have not yet reached an agreement.

Twitter Bing Translations

Twitter just announced their new Bing tweet translation capability, which offers translations in multiple languages. This new feature is now available for all desktop, iOS, and Android devices. For tweets that are not in the users’ native language, Twitter will display a small yellow globe on the top right hand corner, that is clickable, which then activates the translation feature, that works in more than 40 languages.

According to Marketing Land, Twitter has been experimenting with language translation since 2013. Bing translator is not perfect and has its flaws, just like any other online translator, but they do say that “the results still vary and often fall below the accuracy and fluency of translations provided by a professional translator. For this reason, the original text is always displayed above its translation.”

Although, these updates may seem a bit overwhelming and tedious to implement and adapt to, it is always of paramount importance to stay up-to-date with the latest digital trends. Whether you are sharing this information with a client, or simply using it to broaden your knowledge base, keep in mind that this is only a small piece to the overarching puzzle we call social media.