Twitter Visibility Should Aid Future Monetization

Thanks to Ellen’s Oscar-selfie-seen-round-the-world and countless other cultural references, Twitter’s public presence has become the envy of marketers everywhere.
 
According to a new report from Deutsche Bank, a “shocking” 95% of consumers report hearing about Twitter at least once or twice a week, while 62% hear about the microblogging platform at an even higher frequency.
 
Among other information channels, over 80% of non-users report hearing about Twitter on TV, every week.
 
These finding bodes well for Twitter, which continues to struggle with adoption and retention rates among consumers.
 
“These insights highlight that most issues around attraction, conversion and retention of [monthly active users] are largely fixable,” Deutsche Bank writes in its new report. “We believe Twitter is well aware of and working on these issues and are comfortable that MAU growth could re-accelerate at some point in 2014.”
 
Among non-users, 30% report a willingness to begin using Twitter, while 57% of past Twitter users said they would consider giving the service another go.
 
Not all analysts are as confident in Twitter’s growth trajectory. Next year, the company’s domestic growth will fall from nearly 20% in 2003 to below 10%, according to a recent report from eMarketer. In four short years, growth will slow to just 6.4%, the research firm expects.
 
By eMarketer’s reckoning, Twitter’s usership will grow from about 43 million U.S. consumers in 2013 to 65 million in 2018 -- or about half of Facebook’s current domestic user base.
 
Still, for Deutsche Bank -- which used SurveyMonkey to survey of 1,100 people online for its report -- Twitter’s potential is clear.
 
“Partners we speak to continue to characterize Twitter’s monetization efforts as early and a year or two behind Facebook, which speaks to the future opportunity,” Deutsche Bank explains.
 
Many users seem to think ads are regular content, which Deutsche considers to be “a big positive.” To that point, “native ad formats blend well with organic content, as 60% of users noted seeing ads specifically, but over 80% indicated seeing tweets marked ‘Promoted By’ on their timelines.”
 
That said, nearly 85% of current Twitter users reported that ads are not relevant, which, for Deutsche, only suggests an opportunity to improve ad selection and targeting. Nearly 50% of active Twitter users use the service more than once a day -- slightly less than Facebook’s daily active usership rate of about 60%.
 
Also of note, the population of users who tweet appears to be more evenly distributed than the common belief that the majority of tweets are generated by just the top power users. On the contrary, 84% of users send tweets, Deutsche Bank finds.

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