Twitter recently reorganized their news section on their mobile app, getting rid of the Moments tab and placing moments within the new Explore tab. Twitter has also used this opportunity to relegate organic content and attempt to raise their advertising revenues. Now, the first two times users visit the Explore tab in the app on their mobile devices, a large banner advertisement will appear at the top of the page, just under the search bar. Unlike previous Twitter ads, which appeared in users’ timelines and could be easily skipped over, these banners are much harder to miss, as they take up about a third of the screen. After the first two visits, the banners return to showing their usual trending content.
The first tests of the new advertising feature have been used by Disney, to promote their new Christopher Robin movie. The banner shows an animated video of Winnie the Pooh eating from a pot of honey, and by clicking on the banner, it takes users to the search page for the #ChristopherRobin, which includes other posts from both Disney and regular users.
While the new feature is in its’ early stages, it seems to solve the major problem Twitter faced before with advertisers: their ads were often getting skipped over on the timeline and going unnoticed by users. For now, it’s likely to only be used by major companies, and without any specific targeting. However, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to speculate that if the feature is successful, Twitter would expand to allow advertisers to target specific areas, or determine an exact period of time to advertise for, rather than just the first two times a user visits the Explore tab. Twitter could even increase that number if they’d like to even further monetize the feature, though it would come at the expense of organic content.
So, how could this potentially affect agents? Twitter isn’t used nearly as much to advertise on social media as Facebook is, but this feature is part of a renewed push by Twitter to make their platform more advertiser-friendly. It’s mainly directed at larger companies for now, but if it expands and continues to progress, it could become feasible for agents to advertise homes or home valuation tools on Twitter. If that day comes, we will have you covered. For now we’ll just stick with the organic reach of Twitter.
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