• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, December 20, 2016

Call it a convenient feature or a desperate measure, but Twitter is testing breaking news push notifications.

The feature -- first noticed by Buzzfeed -- is common among publishers trying to increase readership. Users with an appetite for unsolicited alerts might appreciate such services, but finding the right push frequency is a challenge. Too many alerts, and readers will run.

For Twitter, the move is part of a broader effort to increase engagement. To that end, the tech giant just began inviting users to create and tweet out live video.

Twitter needs to do something. By next year, eMarketer predicts that more marketers will be using Instagram than the troubled social network.

By 2017, the research firm forecasts, 74.2% of U.S. companies (or at least those with more than 100 employees) will use Instagram for marketing purposes -- markedly more than the 66.2% that will be using Twitter.

If accurate, this will mark a significant shift from this year. By eMarketer’s measure, 66.1% of marketers currently use Twitter, compared to the 53.2% who use Instagram.

Worldwide, revenue from mobile video will reach $25 billion by 2021, according to the Strategy Analytics report. The money is mostly coming from advertisers trying to reach a growing mobile-video audience.