Twitter News Blog:
Twitter is far from new but while many people still don't 'get it', there are even more who have great potential but aren't sure how to make an impact on Twitter. Corporations are dabbling for customer support, sales offers and reputation management. Small businesses are either spamming on Twitter or having mainly personal conversations. Many people are simply broadcasting their day without any true interaction with their Twitter followers. This site will hopefully help you to make the most of Twitter
New versions of both Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android are available today. Both apps bring back high-demand features, including the swipe shortcut, and they also introduce new design and functionality improvements. Here’s a rundown.
Both apps- Swipe shortcut: Swipe a Tweet in your home timeline to reply to, retweet, favorite or share it, or view the Twitter user’s profile, without leaving your timeline.
- “Find friends”: We’ve added a confirmation alert when you select “Find friends”. This notification more clearly and explicitly messages the fact that when you upload your contacts’ email addresses and phone numbers, you can quickly find which of your friends are on Twitter (that is, if they’ve chosen to be discoverable by email or phone number).
Twitter for iPhone- Copy and paste: We’ve returned the ability to copy and paste the text of Tweets and user profiles. Just press and hold to copy.
- Link love: The “share” feature used to just give you the option to copy or email a link to a Tweet. Now, if there’s a link within a Tweet, you’ll see the option to tweet, copy or mail that link, or you can choose to read it later. (Select a “Read Later Service” under Settings > Advanced.)
- Pressing and holding links provides similar options, along with the ability to open the link in Safari.
- Direct messages: We updated the design for Direct Messages and returned the ability to mark all DMs as read. Simply tap the check mark in the lower right corner.
- Font size settings: Change the font size under Settings > Advanced.
Twitter for Android- New devices: Twitter for Android is now optimized to run on Android devices running Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as on the Kindle Fire (available today through the Amazon Appstore) and the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet (available February 23 though the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store).
You can download Twitter for iPhone today from the
App Store and Twitter for Android from
Android Market.
Successful small business owners intuitively know how to build meaningful relationships with their customers. They were the first to use Twitter to talk with consumers in real time, and their creativity demonstrated Twitter’s potential as a marketing platform. Today, some of the most effective marketing campaigns we see come from small, local, or Internet-only businesses—like the mouth-watering photos of @VanillaMoonBake’s cupcakes, or the Tweet contests hosted by @glennztees to promote their latest T-shirt designs.
Soon, small businesses based in the United States will have the chance to take their Twitter marketing efforts to a new level. Starting in late March, we will introduce a new advertising offering that makes it simple for companies of any size to grow their businesses using our Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products.
We’ve partnered with American Express to make it easy for small business owners to advertise on Twitter. American Express Cardmembers and merchants based in the U.S. will be invited to try this new advertising solution before anyone else, and American Express will give $100 in free advertising to the first 10,000 eligible businesses to sign up.
Starting today, American Express Cardmembers and merchants can register to participate in the initial introduction of this new offering via
ads.twitter.com/amex. We will launch this new offering more widely later this year.
Sign up here to try this new ad solution.
In December, we
launched a
new version of Twitter. It’s been available for
mobile phones, via the mobile web, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, and we’ve been rolling it out steadily to Twitter.com. Now, everyone has access to it. A few of the highlights:
- Click any Tweet in your timeline to expand it to see photos, videos, retweets, favorites, and more.
Twitter.com shortcut: You can quickly close all expanded Tweets by pressing “L” (as in Larry) on your keyboard. - Connect is your way to keep conversations going. It’s the place to see who has followed or mentioned you, or retweeted or favorited one of your Tweets.
Twitter.com shortcut: Type “GC” (as in “Go Connect”), to jump to the Connect tab.
- Discover lets you tap into a stream of useful and entertaining information, customized just for you. When you use Discover, you’ll see results reflecting your interests. These are based on your current location, what you follow and what’s happening in the world.
Twitter.com shortcut: “GD” (as in “Go Discover”) takes you to the Discover tab. If you want to go directly to Activity, enter “GA”.
- Embed Tweets on your website by copying and pasting one line of code.
- Take a tour of the new experience.
- Check out the new Twitter brand pages from accounts like @NPRNews, @Audi and others.
By the way, you can see more shortcuts by typing “
?” when you’re on Twitter.com.
Whether or not you were able to watch the #Grammys live on Sunday night, you probably heard about the biggest Twitter moments. Here’s a quick look at how the night played out in Tweets.
- People sent 10,901 Tweets per second (TPS) as Adele won Record of the Year — the peak TPS moment of the night.
- “Grammys” was mentioned in more than 5 million Tweets on Sunday between noon and midnight PT.
- The most mentioned artists (in descending order) during that same 12-hour period were: @OfficialAdele, @ChrisBrown, @NickiMinaj, @Rihanna, Whitney Houston.
At the end of the Super Bowl last weekend, we launched Twitter’s first-ever Ad Scrimmage competition. For a week following the game, Twitter users headed to adscrimmage.twitter.com for a chance to view and vote via Tweet for their favorite Super Bowl ads. And today, the results are in! Congratulations to Samsung’s #votefornote campaign.
In decreasing order of the percentage of the vote they earned, these are the runners-up:
You can view all the winning ads
here.
This year’s Super Bowl was
one of the biggest sports events ever experienced on Twitter and the ads are a big part of what drives the conversation. There’s more info on the
Twitter Ads Blog about the program and the winning campaign.
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