How Can Brands Leverage Twitter Effectively in 2022?

Brands and individuals tune in to Twitter every day to connect with people over real-time conversations and to see and discuss what's going on in the world, across all of their interests and passions. Twitter hosted an online event in March 2022 called #What’shappeningIndia2022 where experts spoke about twitter’s latest innovations, products, content, and commitment to promoting healthy conversations.

Twitter is a vital space for public discourse

During these post-pandemic times, when important conversations are going on around the world, our world has never been clearer and it has never been more critical. Twitter has outlined its purpose as serving the public conversation across news, current affairs, gaming, sports, entertainment, and even investing - it is a vital space for public discourse. Conversations connect people, help share knowledge, and inspire creativity and innovation, but first and foremost it all starts with feeling safe. Hence, providing a safe and healthy platform to everyone is mandatory. According to Sarah Personette, Chief Customer Officer, Twitter “Ensuring a safer Twitter requires a proactive approach with people-based thinking, policies that lead, products that protect, and partnerships that drive industry-wide change to make Twitter a safer place. Twitter is your window into the culture and a hyper-connected world, how and where your brand shows up has never been more important. Our platform is the best place to launch a new product campaign, service, or offer. And is the best place to connect with the big cultural moments your customers care about.”

Twitter serves millions of brands and small businesses present on the platform and is improving and innovating every day to make the experience more seamless and help brands come closer to their consumer. It is giving businesses and individuals a chance to succeed with Twitter for professionals, testing new e-commerce tools, like the shop module and a live shopping experiment to drive sales right in the timeline, it is also getting people paid on Twitter now. Publishers, creators, and developers can get paid through features like ticketed spaces, review, and super follows. The new feature ‘tips’ allows people to support whatever they want whether it's a creator, a cause, or just someone needing help with the rent. All this opens up the power of conversation for brands. Brands win when more creators bring more followers. Twitter is shipping faster, learning faster, deprecating faster, and scaling faster. Consumer Innovation & Audience

Pretha Athrey, Marketing Head at Twitter spoke about consumer innovation and audience, stating that the purpose is to spark public conversation which is valuable to the world both socially and economically. There is space for every topic and conversation on Twitter. It is also deeply committed to building and maintaining a safe and healthy platform to ensure equal participation. While Twitter’s current mission already recognizes that focusing on people is a priority, there is still more work to do.

Pretha debunked a common misconception that Twitter is centered around news and politics. These topics represent only 20% of the tweet volume globally, whereas 80% of the conversation is around people's passions, such as gaming, lifestyle, music, movies, TV, or Sports. The fact is that people on Twitter in India have a truly diverse range of passions: over 64% are interested in technology, 63% in music, more than 57% are interested in sports, over 55% in food & drinks, and much more. Twitter’s audience is often the first to talk about things so when topics or trends start to pop up on Twitter, they provide a window into culture, and what's going to be important in the future. Twitter's superpower has always been an active, leaned-in audience. And today, it's even more valuable to customers because they are influential, receptive and they drive results. Looking ahead, Twitter will be the most effective place for your brand to stand out and lead the conversation.

We know that launches have always been critical to business growth. It starts with consumer behavior and Twitter helps you break through your launch faster and spread wider because of the nature of the audience. Globally, 91% of Twitter users want to see new brand launches on Twitter. With more people seeing and talking about your brand launch campaign on Twitter, it becomes more efficient. While the launch is important, connecting with your audience is also important followed by improving the conversions. Pretha said “This past year we have seen major brands across verticals, be it tech, OEM, auto, media, entertainment, etc, leverage, the full range of Twitter's solutions. Let me share with you some breakthrough campaigns today, starting with Samsung, India that took advantage of Twitter’s solutions to drive massive awareness for the incredible reach of the Samsung Galaxy Watch, and we were able to deliver an invaluable launch. MG motors in India also took to Twitter to introduce MG Aster, India's first car with a personal AI assistant. They unveiled AI Affairs to Indian audiences using Twitter's takeover products and making sure that they were active in a very interesting way for pre-launch, launch, and post-launch, and they were able to taste, reveal and sustain the conversation, across the timeline creating amazing impact. Finally, having a purpose is such an important part of both culture and business at Twitter, one of our core values is winning with purpose, and here we encourage brands to use Twitter in the most impactful way and stay top of mind. We feel that there is no better place than Twitter to launch, connect or drive something meaningful and purposeful for our consumers.”

Twitter for Brands Kanika Mittal, Large Client Solution Head at Twitter spoke about Twitter for brands. Whatever happens in the world happens on Twitter, people come to Twitter to talk about their interests and passions, to follow what their favorite brands are saying. People are in a discovery mindset when they are on Twitter therefore brands are likely to make a lasting impression. The audience on Twitter is influential and receptive and it drives results. Brands are now more than ever leaning on to Twitter to connect with consumers and grow their businesses.

Twitter offers a range of highly customized products that can be tailored and packaged to suit your brand's purpose. Kanika says “We have seen strong results with our Twitter products. We are rapidly improving our performance solutions and providing advertisers with seamless ways to showcase the content that they have created. And on top of that, we have very specific objectives to make sure that every campaign is optimized to help you achieve the right metrics. Brands that deeply care about their customers and their employees can use the platform to deliver any purposeful initiative, evangelize it and make people feel their authenticity because they are on a platform like Twitter where audiences are leaned in and are real and here it is my privilege to talk about a great example - CRED had a wonderful initiative called #tweetforgood where they took to Twitter and tried to make a difference by engaging with users and getting them to contribute to SOS Village India simply by tweeting. That is the power of the platform #tweetforgood surely created tremendous good for society.

The Emerging India Story- SMBs

Deepti Rao, Head-Customer Service APAC (SMB) at Twitter India explored the emerging India story and shared that despite the headwinds from covid last year, the SMB India business on Twitter stayed buoyant and resilient seeing steady growth in both revenues as well as the number of advertisers. More and more SMBs are being drawn to Twitter. It is the digital differentiator. The last few years have seen a sharp trend toward the digitization of SMBs in India. According to the Cisco India SMB, Digital Maturity, Study 2020 - 68% of Indian SMBs will push new products and services on their digital platforms to grow and differentiate themselves from the competition. While there are several digital platforms out there, twitter's unique niche in capturing the current parts of the conversation in India combined with its educated affluent, and engaged audience makes it a force to reckon with. Twitter is an enabler for SMBs looking to build a brand and a strong online presence. It is the ideal platform to launch something new, grow followers, engage with customers beyond customer support and build brand personality by connecting with key moments that are trending in India. More and more SMB businesses are seeing the value and the opportunity in being present on Twitter. Also, going the extra mile SMBs often have lean teams, and having customer support makes all the difference. Twitter’s dedicated sales team for India supports a wide range of SMB businesses with everything from recommendations on campaign strategy to operational support and optimization. In addition, Twitter also conducts webinar training sessions from time to time and has Twitter Flight School- a self-learning platform for those looking to learn more about Twitter advertisements. SMB Businesses can reach out to Twitter through help forms, which are advertised on Twitter via the Twitter business handle, or by writing to advertiser help at twitter.com. Lastly, Twitter helps SMBs to be a part of conversations that matter, it is a powerful platform for several exciting upcoming business verticals such as gaming, crypto, and EDTech.” Twitter leads the way for conversations in this space and provides a great way to reach interested audiences across these sectors. Twitter's advertising policies, which have recently been updated offer more advertisers a chance to go beyond organic engagement on Twitter, and we're seeing significant interest from advertisers in this phase.” Says Deepti. Twitter Next – Innovative Campaigns

Last year the world felt a bit different and it still is to a certain extent, but Twitter is moving ahead in the right direction. “The public conversation about things that matter, topics we love and services we interact with, continued to bind us together. Human-centric creativity and ideas emerging through technology continued to capture attention disproportionately on the timeline. What's even more revealing is that the conversation around international shows streaming in India also grew significantly last year. Brands connect with people on Twitter through every moment that matters to the audience from celebrating yoga day to festivals such as Diwali, and Holi. All these conversations and campaigns continue to drive impact for categories, and multiple brands.” said Rishab Sharma, Head Global- Twitter Next

Beyond all the campaigns today, how a brand shows up in society and on Twitter sets the tone for how the audience is to react to the messages. There are numerous award-winning campaigns in the past where the brand, has brought attention to a cause, a message, and contributed back to society. Living through the pandemic- a sense of purpose has become far more deep-rooted now.

The vision of #OneTwitter

Twitter always strives to be ahead of the curve and ensures to be in sync with what the ecosystem partners need, whether they are agencies, media, creative, strategy, tech, API builders, data, and research partners. “The need is for solutions that go beyond an advertisement that gives an impression. Understanding this need and future potential, Twitter has aligned its strengths into a bouquet of services that can be offered to agencies and brands across the pillars of data, creative & strategy, API, and services. It is called ‘One Twitter’- It's the suite of services that partners in your journey from the time you as a marketer or a brand or an agency think of customer-focused communication till the campaigns have been rolled out and there are metrics to show how well it did. All of this within your single relationship with One Twitter” says Krishna Iyer, Channel Sales Head at Twitter India.

Let's take a look at the various pillars that help move the conversation ahead through One Twitter. The first pillar is data whether it's a hashtag-based feed on a certain vertical or a brand analysis, a topical wave of conversation, the marketing insights & analytics teams have enabled tools that can help with data that is structured, relevant, and actionable through an insight and measured approach. Your idea can have a lot more impact when you begin with the knowledge of where it’s going to play out. Once you have the data to back your idea, the idea must take the form and shape that's designed to impress, for impact at the stage of implementation, and at the campaign success stage, this is where the creative & strategy pillar comes in comprising of Twitter’s in-house global brand’s strategy team- Twitter Next, design studio- Art House and brand sales content offering called Amplify.

These services can bring ideation, innovation, and influence your idea that's not only best suited for performance on Twitter but would also elevate the position of the brand and agency as being ahead of the curve whether it's the launch of a new car streamed live on Twitter or the software brand partnering with Asia's leading media network to discuss the impact of AI on business- Twitter has your back. Additionally, Twitter’s marketing and comms team does work with one-of-a-kind, a chosen few successful campaigns that help showcase the idea and its seamless execution across different media both earned and paid.  

The API pillar is where Twitter has partnered with tens of solution enablers who can help your brand across audience targeting, creative, AD experiences, and campaign management advertising analysis. Additionally, we're also offering partner activation credits, funds that can cover fees with partners who unlock valuable product offerings for Twitter campaigns. Now what brings all of this together is the ability to ensure each brand and agency can tap into any of these pillars in a seamless and output-driven way. Thus, servicing is the final and binding pillar. Twitter is adaptive for all brands across multiple budget levels and service requirements and has the ability and team structures to manage them all so whether you are a small business owner, a new growing D2C brand, or the world's most aspirational mobile phone OEM, Twitter can cater to all with the right mix of idea, influence, and impact. In conclusion, the idea of #OneTwitter is to be a solutions partner to all brands and agencies from the time the idea is rough and meandering till it succeeds, sustains, and brings the agency & brand what they set out to achieve. 

Sports on Twitter- Everyone’s favorite topic of conversation

Twitter is where people come to find out what's happening in real-time. It could be to catch up on the biggest news of the day or not to be missed entertainment, or even the biggest sports moments and memes. Conversations that make up cultural touchpoints and communities come to Twitter and thrive and that’s incredibly exciting not just for those who are consuming that content day by day but also for content partners and publishers across the country in multiple languages. “We work a lot in the video and live video space with content publishers, and our partners create and share premium content that brands love to align with. Twitter's amplify sponsorships program leverages the power of that premium content allowing publishers to monetize their best video content, and advertisers to associate with videos that brands save via that one-to-one, mapping with publishers. Brands get a share of voice and access to high engagement, occasions, events, and even bespoke video content. So, we're talking innovation, great content and we are talking audience engagement. We had incredible success with interactive campaigns, custom content campaigns across verticals from the worlds of tech business, and thought leadership across various formats.” Says Amrita Tripathy, Head, Global Content Partnership team at Twitter India.

Brands can tap into and leverage the conversations, and get an incredible brand lift by aligning with partners who are hand-selected across all the content categories and ride the tremendous momentum that arises from these conversations. In the context of sports, Twitter is the roar of a stadium and it does double up as a natural second screen for sports as people want to watch & share in real-time together as a community. We all know of the incredible community that came together around Cricket on Twitter with a whopping 96.2 million tweets in a year with 4.4 million unique authors. Amrita also spoke with two stalwarts – the very well-known Harsha Bhogle and Gaurav Kapur, who are the best in the business to share their unique insights about the business of sports in the digital era. The conversation revolved around a few things that brands can keep in mind when they align with premium content. The most important being that Twitter has democratized content creators – a lot of real-time conversations are happening on the platform. Also, brands & cricket are a match made in heaven as people naturally follow sports. However, brands must be authentic and must tell relevant stories to be a perfect fit for the business of sports. 

The India Growth Story

Apurva Dalal, Director of Engineering Site Lead at Twitter India shared his interpretation of Twitter mentioning it as a service where history is being recorded for several significant global movements, whether it was the Chandrayaan-2 launch in 2019, Biden's victory, #wediditjoe in 2021 to a covid-19 pandemic or most recently the war in Ukraine. Twitter is available in 11 Indian languages. Almost 50% of Tweets in India are now in languages other than English, whether it’s elections or movie releases, or the world cup match. It's all unfolding on Twitter in real-time across languages bringing millions of Indians closer to learning about what's happening, empowering voices, connecting like-minded individuals, and enabling them to grow and learn along #Indiaistwitter. 

Shirish Andhare, Director and Head of products at Twitter India, spoke further about the India story. He mentioned that Twitter is deeply committed to the Indian market and talent with a dedicated tech team on the ground. He spoke about how Twitter is going to fulfill aspirations and ideas of making India happen on Twitter through a combination of global and India first innovations. India is unlike any other region, it has a diversity of interests, cultures, and languages which contribute to very unique product challenges, and that just motivates Twitter to focus even more deeply on Indian users, stay agile and responsive to everything one can learn from millions of conversations happening on the service, and to improve the service for every Indian every single day. Twitter is actively investing in a broad selection of content in a variety of languages and formats that are unique to the needs of India, its past times, and its passions. It will be investing in media-rich content and creators across a diverse range of topics and languages while doubling down on creating the best experiences for India's passions, starting with cricket. Twitter plans to focus on fostering online communities and bringing them even closer while enabling everyone to discover information, learn, entertain and grow together. 

Hearing out these industry experts has made it evident why Twitter is the perfect place to announce something new or connect with what's going on across industries. Having seen the value proposition, we know what to expect in the year ahead! It’s important to learn how to leverage social media to your brand’s advantage and we at #ARMWorldwide can help you out in doing that. Contact us to transform and grow together.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this blog is primarily sourced from the virtual event that Twitter India hosted in March 2022. The information provided is for general information purposes only. All information provided here is in good faith, however, we make no representation or warranty of any kind, expressed or implied regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of any of this information.