Twitter introduces Twitter for Professionals, What This Means For Shopping

March 16, 2022 | Tune in here.

I was surprised when this news came out, mainly because I always assumed it was already available, but Twitter announced ‘Twitter for Professionals’ late last year.

Twitter says on their blog “We know people come to Twitter to interact with brands and engage in conversations about products and services. All this demand gives us confidence in the power of combining real-time conversation with enhanced features for professionals aimed at better controlling and enhancing their identity on Twitter.”

It is a little unclear what this feature does. There are 3 modules - About, Newsletter and Shop.

The About Module seems to just allow you to designate a category and the type of professional account you are. That is either Business or Creator. Between a personal and professional About account, the difference is quite subtle. Twitter will simply include your category in your profile. I haven’t yet seen what the difference is between a Business or Creator account. I imagine they are still building that out a bit but it will mostly likely revolve around targeting. This is both what the professionals are able to target in paid ads and how Twitter considers the account in its algorithm.

The Newsletter Module is pretty cool. There’s a tile with a ‘Subscribe’ button that of course allows you to subscribe to a newsletter. No other social media platform has this to my knowledge. Google recently released ‘Lead Forms Extensions’ which I am seeing everywhere but that would require a much more involved process than subscribing to a newsletter. This certainly makes acquiring user data much easier for remarketing. It’s unclear whether user data can eventually flow through to a CDP. I would think that Twitter wants you to use Revue, which is a newsletter service it acquired in early 2021 for an amount undisclosed.

The Shop Module is the most intriguing and by that I mean slightly confusing. It isn’t confusing to understand. Just as its name suggests, it is designed to make Twitter a shopping experience. 

Now I’m sure you’re just as surprised as I am. Twitter has always been an awareness platform. You use it when you have something to say and this is both on the user side and advertising side. People share thoughts and, in the same spirit, brands pay to make announcements on that platform. You don’t expect conversions or revenue from your Twitter ads but instead optimize toward reach metrics.

Twitter has always had this eclectic personality. It’s acquired so many other companies since its inception in 2006. Most notably are Vine, Squad, Breaker and Threader.

Vine as many people know was a colossal failure. Twitter bought the app for $30 million in late 2012, just 4 months after it was created but even before it launched. This was the most surprising piece of research that I stumbled upon. Successful acquisitions always already had an underlying value that would benefit the acquirer. It’s usually for talent or technology that can integrate or complement the original core offering. When Facebook acquired Instagram the same year for the then jaw dropping sum of $1 billion, it already had about 27 million users. Vine hadn’t even launched yet.

There was a roller coaster of issues that plagued the app in the 4 years that Twitter was running it. Main blow was losing Dom Hofmann in 2014, who was the co-founder running the company, rather abruptly. Other executives came and left and this brain drain caused Vine to lose in competing with other video format apps. Instagram eventually introduced video in a 15 seconds format, which was nearly 3x as long as Vine’s. Ultimately, this made content creation more sensible as opposed to the memes coming out of Vine. Snapchat, of course, became the dominant player in UGC video sharing.

It is pretty clear that Twitter was drawn to the 6-second format as a complementary alternative to its tweets. What’s also clear is that they had no vision for how this would fold under Twitter’s brand, whether a product integration or standalone app.

Squad is a recent acquisition that was made in December 2020. I don’t believe the details of the acquisition are disclosed. What’s interesting here is that they shuttered the app immediately. This was a talent acquisition play where co-founders Esther Crawford and Ethan Sutin and their team are being folded into Twitter’s product, design and engineering departments. What Twitter intends to do with screen-sharing social messaging technology is yet to be seen. They made this purchase a month after shutting down Fleets which was their equivalent to Instagram stories. I think it’s clear they want to capture more social interaction in their ecosystem but it’s certainly confusing how they are doing it.

The following month, in January 2021, Twitter acquires Breaker. Same deal, undisclosed amount, team gets folded in and app gets shuttered. This time though, Twitter Spaces is launched. It technically launched in November 2020 in a limited capacity but eventually became widely available in May 2021. This is one that I actually think makes sense. I don’t know how much Breaker was necessary for a broader launch of Spaces but I think the product is a good complement. Users are already tweeting, retweeting and commenting and this is becoming a conversation on the platform. So this is another format for that conversation to take place, which will drive app usage and user engagement up.

Threader, the last on my list, was acquired in November 2021. I haven’t used it but I can see its value for sure. It’s supposed to make reading related tweets a more user-friendly experience. Twitter integrated this technology into the platform, calling it Twitter Blue and charging $2.99 a month to use.

Twitter’s track record of acquisitions certainly has a common theme. It is looking for technology that can make Twitter more than the mass reach announcement platform it is today.

Although Twitter’s technology shopping spree paints the picture of a company that both doesn’t know where it’s headed next but also spreading itself too thin, it does actually have good metrics. Monetizable daily active users reached 217M in Q4 2021, this is up 6M from the previous quarter. It really hasn’t seen a decline in active users since 2016, probably even since launching in 2006.

Financials are strong as well. It managed to grow Q4 2021 revenue by 22% to $1.57 billion vs prior year, even with Apple privacy changes. Meta on the other hand saw its stock plunge about 20%, wiping out $200 billion in market value due to a decline in daily active users of 1 million from its core Facebook app in addition to lost advertising revenues from Apple privacy changes.

I would have thought with how Twitter is drastically adding features into its platform that there would be more red flags in its financials. Instead, the sum of all these moves are actually keeping the platform relevant.

With Twitter launching its Shop module as well as ad formats that support shopping on the platform, it’s signaling a shift to advertisers that it is moving away or widening its core audience and therefore its competitive positioning. Twitter has always been the top player for top of funnel media. It commands brand followers who eagerly check in for updates and announcements. Advertisers on the platform know it's a good place to drive brand awareness and push users down the funnel, typically through other tactics and channels.

Introducing shoppable ad formats into Twitter feeds isn’t an easy home run. YouTube is also trying to capture the business of bottom-of-funnel, ready to convert users. I believe their beta to leverage shopping feeds on YouTube campaigns came out in late 2020. I’ve had the opportunity to use this in a few of my campaigns and I was certainly impressed with results. I talked about YouTube’s ‘Send to Phone’ button in a previous episode, which I still can’t get to work but I’m probably not trying hard enough. 

Tiktok has also announced enhancements to its conversion tracking to attract more ad dollars from DTC brands. They have this sort of late mover advantage because they were probably not tracking properly before Apple changed its privacy policy. So now, any enhancement will just seem like growth. As a tangent, I am pretty intrigued that Tiktok has not yet done much in AR. They seem to be focused on capturing more ad dollars in the immediate term than staying relevant in the future. This does make sense, I just think they would have also wanted to start exploring that front.

Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of ad dollars that will continue to shift to digital formats. Inventory is widening across various social media platforms and brands will be able to choose where to invest. The question is really just: “Is Twitter the right platform to capture shoppers?”

I’ve always looked at Twitter and Snapchat as similar platforms in terms of their positioning in the social media universe. Neither of them are the major players but they both command highly engaged and very loyal users, each at different user journey stages.

Twitter is the app where you probably start your day to learn about the latest developments in the topics with which you are most interested. You will then probably check your Facebook or Instagram feed at some point and multiple times throughout the day to see how your immediate circle is reacting. Then you’ll probably end the day with Snapchat and interact with a bunch of filters. Point being that the consciousness of someone on Twitter is very different from someone on Snapchat even if this is the same person.

The companies are also very different. Snapchat has had a much more focused roadmap of products throughout its history. I recently learned that they consider themselves as a camera company and anyone in social media marketing would know that their ad products always revolve around something new they can do with their lens.

They have a pretty clear understanding of what their platform is, what their strengths are and it’s coming across in their sales material. They share unduplicated reach metrics because they know that it’s part of their strength. They don’t command as large of an audience as Facebook or Instagram. They’re not even very global but they do have a very loyal customer base at the right age demographics. It’s a pretty healthy distribution from the ages of 13 to 35.

Looking at daily average users, there’s been a few slight dips in prior years but they’ve reached 319 million in Q4 2021. This beats Twitter by over 100 million users and I think this is the true problem.

Being a niche player, Twitter needs to dramatically grow its daily active users. It is more of a global player than Snapchat yet it has less active users. I believe Twitter’s distribution by country is more even than that of Snapchat, who is strong in the US and India.

I assume that Twitter, seeing these comps, thinks that it needs an aggressive acquisition strategy to introduce more features into its platform and therefore acquire more users. Shoppable ad formats are certainly a lucrative stream of advertising dollars but tapping into this market is a very different one than where Twitter holds strong.

I believe that Twitter is most active during the hours of 11am and 1pm. This is when tweets get the most clicks. Conversely, in my experience, e-Commerce activity is strongest beginning 12pm to about 6pm. Give or take a couple hours of course for the time difference between where the ad account is domiciled vs geos that it supports.

With Twitter’s acquisition track record, I am very curious to see how this plays out. They are under new leadership as of November last year and have had more seamless integrations in recent years.