Twitter’s strengths lie in fast conversation around events as they happen with an inherent wealth of live breaking news. As one of the biggest international sports tournaments kicks off today (pun very much intended) the platform is ready with several new features to up its user sign ups and engagement, attract big brand activity and generally show-off its best features through fast breaking news and live engagement.
Rolling out several new features around the World Cup Brazil ’14, Twitter looks to appeal to several stakeholders. Not only that of a highly engaged user base but also shareholders in driving user retention and expanding the perception of its brand value.
Twitter’s stock value is currently 45% down and growing concerns from the markets is focused solely on its growth potential. Though Twitter’s audience is much bigger than its active user base. There are vast amounts of tweets embedded into news stories all over the web. An overlooked value of unique content including breaking news and unique personal updates shows that Twitter’s problem isn’t its user retention but its brand perception.
Lots of people have tried Twitter (there are more than 900 million registered Twitter accounts) but most of them get overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of information and abandon activity early (there were 255 million monthly active users at last count). A survey by Deutsch Bank found that the main reasons people quit Twitter come down to their struggles to find relevant information, or their inability to filter out irrelevant information. For World Cup fanatics new to Twitter, the service is trying to address these problems from the outset.
Twitter hopes to tackle initial discovery problems from the moment new users sign up. Offering accurate follower suggestions based on World Cup news and profiles. An opportunity, Twitter knows, for users to get the information they want, sooner and increase their engagement in the #worldcup14 conversation with confidence and comfort with the platform.
To aid the World Cup experience on Twitter even further new features include a special news aggregation algorithm for World Cup coverage. Combining updates from teams, officials, players, managers, coaches, teams and leading fans in a single live feed providing followers with ‘up to the second’ news from World Cup sources they may not have otherwise found.
More features include Introducing emoji style national flag graphics or ‘hash-flags’ to encourage national team supporter engagement and a great way to add colour to an otherwise text based feed.
QUALITY: Twitter have added #HashFlags! #ENG #ARG #AUS #BEL #BRA #CIV #CMR #COL #CRO #ESP #FRA #GER #GHA #ITA #JPN #MEX #NED #RUS #USA #URU
— BBC Sporf (@BBCSporf) June 10, 2014
11 Facts about World Cup Twitter Users
