Tag: Twitter Marketing

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Twitter Introduces Two New Revenue Streams For Artists

Twitter Spaces

With the launch of Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces, social media giant Twitter is doing its part to help creators make more money online.

Twitter recently launched two new offerings that artists can earn from, though both are currently available to only a select amount of users. The first, Super Follows, enables creators to generate monthly revenue for themselves (and Twitter) by allowing users to subscribe to a feed for $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 per month. Only users who are over the age of 18 and have at least 10,000 followers can enable the new super follows feature.

According to reports, Twitter will only take 3% of creators’ revenue after in-app purchase fees. But that’s on top of the 30% already charged by Apple and Google. Twitter also ups their cut as you begin making serious money. For example, after users exceed $50,000 lifetime earnings on Twitter, the app will take 20% of all future earnings after fees. That’s a jump from 33% to 50% of revenue taken before it enters the creator’s pocket. Compare that to something like Patreon, which only takes 5% to 12% of a creator’s earnings, with no concern about in-app purchases.

The other feature, Ticketed Spaces, hopes to leverage the recent popularity of audio-based social media for profit. Anyone eligible to create a Ticketed Space can set their ticket price between $1 and $999. Creators also control how many tickets can be sold, which might justify that near $1k price tag for a one-on-one meeting. Ticketed Spaces attendees are notified of the event through in-app notifications.

Anyone on Twitter over the age of 18 with at least 1,000 followers and three hosted Spaces can apply to use Ticketed Spaces. Access to Ticketed Spaces is limited for now, so everyone will need to apply. Twitter faces competition from Facebook, which has implemented something similar in its recently launched Facebook Live Audio Rooms.

Clubhouse, the platform that helped bring drop-in audio chats to the masses, allows users to tip anyone hosting an event. While that feature is useful, it redirects users to third-party services to complete the process. Those extra steps can be costly in more ways than one. Twitter Spaces, while tied to a fairly steep revenue share, streamlines the process.

One positive side effect of the ongoing pandemic is there more companies than ever are helping creative people make money online. From streaming platforms to social media, it seems everyone wants to be in business with people able to create digital spaces that draw users. These companies are also making a percentage of all the money everyone else makes, of course, but that’s the nature of business.

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Twitter Launches Twitter Fleets. Now What? [Video]

After months of development and speculation, Twitter Fleets, Twitter’s take on Instagram Stories, is finally here.

Competition breeds innovation. That is the lesson taught by many professors to business students around the world. Lately, however, it seems competition is breeding sameness, and that is a growing problem in social media that the newly launched Twitter Fleets won’t help.

Rolling out in many countries this week, Twitter Fleets is essentially Instagram Stories for people who mainly rely on Twitter. Users are able to share text, photos, and videos in posts that will disappear after twenty-four hours. The posts appear at the top of users’ feeds, and they’re arranged based on what the algorithm believes users want to see. Unlike Instagram, there is no augmented reality component, nor is there a ‘swipe up’ feature to link users to sites outside of the Twittersphere.

But does Fleets have a place in the music marketing ecosystem? We’ll let Music Biz host James Shotwell give you the answer:

For those unable to watch the video, the answer is complicated. Musicians who have more Twitter followers than IG followers stand to benefit the most from Fleets’ arrival. As long as fans engage with their content, artists with sizable Twitter followings can circumvent the timeline algorithm and appear at the top of every feed with Fleets. That said, without the ability to link to content outside the platform, Fleets’ power remains surprisingly limited.

This leads us to the question of why Fleets exists at all. On Instagram, Stories are where people post content from their daily lives. The pictures and videos that appear in Stories are fleeting (no pun intended) moments, while the content users post in their main feed is intended to last forever. Tweets, by and large, come with a short life expectancy. The best performing tweets are shared and mentioned for a week or two, at most, before disappearing into a person’s timeline. Far more tweets come and go without any engagement at all. So, what do Fleets offer that tweets cannot?

Given the tool’s infancy, it’s likely Fleets will undergo several changes in the weeks and months ahead. We’ll update our take as needed.

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Twitter is planning to delete dormant accounts in the near future

Twitter users who have not accessed their account in a long time are encouraged to log in before December 11 or risk losing their handles.

Username availability is a growing problem in social media. Much like email before it, social media has now been around long enough that new users are increasingly struggling to find unclaimed handles. For example, if your name is John Smith, you cannot use @John or @JohnSmith or @TheJohnSmith on Twitter. You also probably can’t use @John_Smith, @JSmith, @J_Smith, or @The_John_Smith. Those names are already in use, and getting someone to surrender their handle is often an uphill battle that can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Adding to the frustration is the fact that not all the usernames are in use. Someone claimed the name, but now the account sits dormant. Usernames that many would want, such as @AuxCord, sit unused on social media with abandoned accounts (or worse, accounts that never posted in the first place).

But a reckoning may be on the horizon. Twitter user Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) shared an email they received this week from the social media giant regarding an account he owns that has sat dormant for some time. In the email, Twitter informed Navarra he needed to agree to the company’s terms, privacy policy, and cookie use to continue using the platform. The letter also said they had until December 11, 2019, to access his dormant account. If Navarra failed to do so, they would risk losing their handle permanently.

Navarra, wanting to retain the dormant account, logged into Twitter using a link in the email and captured the prompts that appeared:

The decision to mass delete dormant accounts will open hundreds, if not thousands of desirable usernames to the public. Such a move would boost interest in the social media platform and likely lead to a rise in new accounts, not to mention increased engagement.

Twitter has not publicly commented on Navarra’s tweets or officially announced plans to remove dormant accounts. That said, the company is well within its rights to delete accounts that do not agree to Twitter’s new terms, privacy policy, and cookie use.

Readers hoping to claim a dormant account when they become available should consider using Handlescout. The service, which is free, tracks username availability on Twitter and sends email alerts when desired handles become available.

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This is why automated Twitter promotions are (always) a bad idea

Ah, Twitter. Where would our culture be without you? After all, Twitter is one of, if not the best place in the world for people to gather and discuss the events of the day while using names other than their own. You can choose to use your actual name of course, but most people prefer for a humorous or clever nickname instead, and therein lies the problem with any automated Twitter promotion. 

You would be hard pressed to find a single artist, brand, or company that doesn’t rely on Twitter every single day for their marketing efforts. The approaches these entities use to engage their audience varies drastically, but they all aim to accomplish the same goal of keeping people interested in whatever product, song, movie, or related offering the account has to promote. In theory, those that feel connected to a brand are more likely to support it, and if they have fun engaging with a brand they’re likely to share their enjoyment with others who in turn may start following the brand as well. This is the entire concept behind social media marketing: Make something people want to click and share, make it easy for them to do those things, then create more content with the same goal in mind and repeat. It has been this way since the dawn of the digital age and it will likely remain as such for the foreseeable future.

Automated promotions, in theory, make it possible to engage more people without doing more work. The idea is that these campaigns, which usually offer followers the ability to create shareable gifs or images, is that brands are giving fans something they will want to share with others that reflects positively on the brand. The most popular approach to this idea so far has been custom jerseys using followers’ Twitter handles, which is an approach that has been disastrously utilized by both the New England Patriots and, more recently, the Montreal Canadiens. Both teams didn’t see the harm in making it possible for any fan to create a jersey with their name on it, but neither team could have imagined the type of ridiculous handles some fans would use to align themselves with their organization(s). Here are a few examples of what happened next…

The above images are all incredibly offensive, but truth be told they are not even the worst examples of automated promotions we’ve seen. Some tweets we discovered were too offensive to even post on the blog! 

Both the Patriots and the Canadiens were quick to apologize for any offensive tweet that may have been seen, but the damage to their brands was already done. There are literally hundreds of screenshots from these campaigns circulating online, and they will more than likely continue to appear in searches for custom jerseys for the foreseeable future. Like everything else, once these images were available online they were part of the internet forever, and there is no way any organization will be able to fully erase them for the digital landscape.

while we have yet to see any record labels just on the automated promotion bandwagon, it’s not hard to imagine a point in the near future when some type of similar campaign is mounted by one of the majors or an independent artist who is trying to further utilize their strong online following. If and when that time comes I promise there will be more disastrous results, and there is really no way that can be stopped. As it stands now, there are no tools available for filtering automated promotions, and because of that anyone who chooses to use such marketing techniques is making themselves and their brand incredibly vulnerable. 

Learn from those who have tried and failed to make these promotions work in the past. Automated Twitter promotions are simply a bad idea.

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