Digithoughts

Light night, I met @GeneChanSF before hearing him speak about using Twitter for Brand Building & ROI, at the San Diego American Marketing Association’s monthly event. He recently joined Twitter to help redefine social media, and introduced his presentation with this inspirational video.

@GeneChanSF’s point is that you don't have to be an active participant to enjoy Twitter; you can enjoy all it's benefits by simply listening. Twitter's growth has been substantial. It has 100M+ Active Users, 600K+ new users per day, and 230M+ tweets per day.

With mobile devices growing, it was a surprise to learn only 57% of active Twitter users have it on their mobile device. @GeneChanSF also discussed how Twitter developed their ad platform, how they take into consideration relevance, resonance, and real-time results in an attempt to get brands the most from their offerings. If you're not familiar with the ad platform, here are the three options:

• Promoted Trends - The cost is $120K for a 24-hour period and it gets you at the top of the Trends box in the lower-right corner of the site.
• Promoted Tweets - Pay on a Cost per Engagement structure; @GeneChanSF claimed this is a great way to grow your footprint on Twitter (Engagement is defined as a follow, RT, link click, or reply, and costs about $1 - $2 per engagement).
• Promoted Accounts - Targeted to users that look like your followers, based on a Twitter-developed algorithm.

To drive organic growth on Twitter, @GeneChanSF recommended to tweet more content that serves a utilitarian or entertainment purpose, and integrate your Twitter handles and hash tags with all media sources, particularly TV and Offline Advertisements. Echoing several recent articles in the press, he mentioned how Twitter is changing TV and that live tweeting is becoming more popular as people are participating during TV episodes and while on the set. @GeneChanSF equates this type of engagement to watching the uncut footage at the end of a movie as you listen (watch) the on-set conversations and out-takes.

Overall, I thought the event and presentation was informative and valuable. Maybe the content was nothing new for a social media strategist, but as an analyst who is trying to stay apprised of emerging trends online I found it beneficial.

If you want to hear others' thoughts on last night's event, check out the conversation on Twitter for yourself. Or were you there? What did you think?

Nicole Rawski Sr. Analyst

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