Twitter is a force to reckon with in social media. Even though it lacks the massive scale of Facebook, it popularity as a microblogging platform is growing in great leaps.
Twitter reported that its number of monthly average users grew to 271 million a growth of 24 percent year-over-year. Its revenue increased 129 percent which made its stock to jump 30 percent in after-hours trading.
The stock jump followed the announcement of $283 million and sales, $277 million from ad sales. This announcement was made on Tuesday and it is better than what was projected.
Last year was not good for Twitter as it saw the prices of its ads falling which raised questions about the value of Twitter advertising. The growth seemed to have stalled.
But now those who were wondering whether advertising on Twitter was a good bet have been answered by the results posted this year.
As stated earlier, the number of users hit 271 million. This is a growth of 6.3 percent compared to the last quarter and it is also better than the 4 percent in the first quarter of the year. Though Business Insider says it is a bit sluggish compared to the site’s past growth.
Twitter ads seem to be doing well if the money spent on them in this quarter is anything to go by.
But what is responsible for this growth? Twitter has invested heavily in mobile advertising and this is one of the key factors in its revenue growth. In fact 80 percent of Twitter’s ad revenue came from mobile advertising last quarter.
Last year, Twitter announced that it had plans to acquire MoPub for $350 million. MoPub is a mobile advertising service. Twitter has also announced its plans to acquire TapCommerce, a mobile advertising technology firm, for $100 million.
Twitter has worked to give advertisers better data on the performance of the ads they buy.
The company has also worked to give advertisers better data on the performance of the ads they buy.
Twitter began experimenting last year with giving users access to their analytics. It has started rolling out analytics even for those who don’t buy ads. Earlier the analytics was only limited to advertisers.
It was also shown last year that advertising like Twitter-sponsored tweets have a great reach. For example, Hasan Syed, a businessman from Chicago managed to reach about 50,000 people in New York and UK.
But what makes Twitter to be so popular? Twitter is easy to use; there is no explanation needed when one needs to use it, and there is no technical know-how needed. All you need to do is to open an account and start tweeting.
It is also easier to get Twitter followers than getting blog followers. This is quite appealing especially to startups.
Twitter also offers a great way to pretend you are someone’s friend so you can turn them to be your customers later.
The fact that Twitter only allows only a limited number of words to be posted is also one of its strengths. This ensures that users only post what is important. In most instances people are forced to summarize their statements and focus only on critical issues.
