Twitter has generated a lot of talk recently in the social media world with the emergence of a new Twitter website and the worm attack it recently faced being the biggest talking points.
A guide to the new Twitter
On September 14th 2010, the Twitter HQ was a hive of activity. This was the event (live blogging by Tech Crunch) which introduced the new Twitter.
At the event stats were given on Twitter’s growth:
- Since the beginning of the year Twitter users on mobile are up 250%
- 16% of new users are starting on mobile.
- There are on average 370,000 new sign ups a day overall
- 90% of the information on Twitter is public
- We’re now seeing 90 million tweets a day – or above on average
- About 25% of tweets contain links
They then introduced the new Twitter with a video, which can be found at the meet the new Twitter webpage with further information on Twitter’s official blog.
The new Twitter website is said to rolling out to everybody in stages over the coming weeks. Luckily, one benefit of working at a place where we dabble in social media marketing we soon had one of the twitter accounts we control migrated to the hot topic #newtwitter within the first few days.
A screenshot of the homepage:
On the homepage but looking at a user’s profile:
Having used it a fair amount I think it definitely improves on the old Twitter in many ways. The scrolling tweets, the ease of access to profiles, and retweets provides an extra level of usability. It keeps the home feed alive on the same page whilst you check out somebody elses profile and subsequent tweets.
Benefits the new Twitter brings
- Rich media as the interface embeds Youtube and Flikr
- Keyboard shortcuts (pressing F5 seems to ask you if you want to retweet)
- Its faster and a much cleaner interface to use
- A users profile can be displayed with retweets and replies listed
From a Web design and SEO aspect this is so important as it keeps people on a website. However, that wasn’t a major problem for what is one of the biggest social media platforms. Or was it?
External Twitter clients & applications
The number of Twitter clients is ever growing with many of them offering a better interface than the Twitter website. This new version will help keep people using the Twitter website rather than flirting with other popular clients.
There was a lot of talk around this; firstly, is twitter warming up to allowing ads to appear in the sidebar? Are they taking on the hundreds of Twitter Apps out there and placing them into their own version? You can imagine developers would suffer if they did – to the detriment of Twitter as they have pushed its boundaries further.
Twitter is a platform for content
Whilst some cool stats were being pumped out, they also gave a few pearls of wisdom about Twitter – how the rebuilt infrastructure lets them add new features on the fly, and how mobile technology is the future (hence lots of mobile stats). However, the biggest one that stood out for me was:
Evan Williams said: Twitter levels the playing field between creators and consumers of content.
Twitter can be such a valuable platform in marketing content. Many bloggers use Twitter for exactly this reason, as you are able to bridge the gap with others in your industry, reading and sharing each other’s content between each other’s followers.
Over the past few months we have recently set up a blog on its own domain (with no background) for a client, for which we also created a Twitter account (the one from the screenshots above). There hasn’t been a major push in link building and marketing of content as of yet, the blog is in its early stages with the Twitter account being moderately used with little talking and updating it with each new post. We are happy with its progress thus far, as it has over well 50 followers (no twitter bots here!) and out of around 30 tweets so far, it has had around 10 retweets by a few people and industry organisations.
What does this mean for somebody running a blog? Traffic.
It is clear to see that Twitter on its own has managed to bring in 7% of traffic, at a steady rate, simply by tweeting the blog’s content. A blog which is not even 3 months old. This is why social media can be used as a platform to push content and don’t forget it isn’t the only one, you have Facebook too.
New Twitter analytics to allow measuring of performance
It has been reported that Twitter will release a real-time Twitter analytics package for free – this would be such a big step for Twitter. It will allow people to understand how people are engaging with Twitter, incredibly useful for marketing purposes looking into the benefits of a Twitter account.
What else has happened with Twitter lately?
Besides the main talking point being new Twitter, there has still been a few other things being talked about:
Twitter Worm Security Exploit
A serious worm exploit revealed itself using JavaScript and CSS inserted into a tweet. It caused havoc across Twitter as it used a special command which meant if you hovered over an infected tweet, it ran the command. In some cases this was just a massive increase in text but for others it retweeted the tweet, which was retweeted by many others until the one who started had seen over 200,000 retweets! Twitter managed to fix the exploit and no real harm was done.
Additional Features
Twitter was quick to enhance the new service after some feature requests which now sees auto-complete text. If a person types @ then a list of names will appear. As part of the rebuilt infrastructure, it allows the development team to implement similar features in the future.
This has been an interesting time for Twitter, it has already shown real growth and doesn’t seem to be slowing down alongside social media as a whole.
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