The rise of hashtag advertising, Twitter revenue grows 150%

Twitter has more than doubled its ad revenue in the past year as brands line up for targeted and youth-focused solutions on the platform

A few months ago, around the time that the festive season was kicking off in India, Motorola was looking to launch the Moto Z smartphone. Lenovo India, which owns the brand, approached Twitter, wanting to spread the word among the young users of the platform.

The two collaborated to come up with a special set of hashtags and the response was beyond everyone’s expectations. Not only did the company get the conversation going about phone’s look and features,  data about customer preferences helped tweak its sales and communication strategy for maximum impact. 

“The brand ran a poll campaign to understand user preference for available mods (personalised tech that users could snap on to their Moto Zs). Impressively, the result matched 99% with the actual sale numbers showing that this is where shoppers show the highest intent to explore and buy a product,” says Taranjeet Singh, business head, Twitter India.

Lenovo India is not the only company to have turned to Twitter as an advertising platform; a host of brands including Nestle, Kingfisher, Vodafone, Tata Motors have done that in the past year or so. Brands want to reach out to the young, get nimble with their communication strategies and want platforms that offer reach and focused targeting at the same time. Twitter has jumped at the opportunity to offer customised brand solutions for consumer engagement, and in the process, has grown its revenues from advertising by 150% since January 2016, says Singh.

The company took over the revenue function in India from the last calendar, and has been working towards increasing the pie. Consequently, India is now among the top five markets for Twitter in terms of revenue and users, the other four being US, Japan, South Korea and Greater China. The growth, explains Singh, has come with categories like auto and telecom becoming aggressive on social media, aided by other big users including the government, technology firms and banking and finance companies. “The 150% year-on-year growth is substantial. India is one of our key markets across the world. In terms of users and revenue growth, we are in the top five markets. In 2013-14 we were not even in the top 10,” he reveals.

Siddharth Banerjee, national head, Brand and Consumer Insights, Vodafone India says, “We use Twitter for a variety of marketing objectives. From campaign awareness, amplification and business to better and faster query resolution. Vodafone has leveraged Twitter strongly over the past few quarters to boost consumer engagement and connect key messages to specific audiences.” He talks about the ZooZoo emoji engagement  during the Vivo IPL 2016.  The #BeSuper campaign notched up millions of impressions and has become a Twitter case study in India, he adds.

Recognising the potential, Twitter has restructured its advertising team to better serve clients across categories, irrespective of the size and target group. “We have consolidated and merged our revenue teams under one single unit that is the Twitter Client Solutions team and the focus is to get better alignment and synergy across the market,” explains Singh. The company, with the new structure is confident it will be able to give emerging advertisers the right attention and direction they need and help them scale up their communication on the platform. 

For brands, the platform provides an almost real time engagement channel and a unique feedback loop. It also helps them change perceptions. Consider the example of Kingfisher. The brand wanted to cut through the negative associations on account of its ties with the financial mess around Vijay Mallya. The company collaborated with the platform on several initiatives to do that. Twitter, in turn, partnered with NetBase to identify the most popular names of fans for the IPL teams and the brand saw its ‘daily positive sentiment’ increase significantly during the campaign.

“Twitter is the live connection to culture. If you want to know what’s happening around the world, what people are talking about, what people care about you will come here. Our trends are topical, in the moment and in this way Twitter is a discovery platform,” says Singh. 

Another brand that successfully used Twitter to deal with a crisis is Tata Motors. The company was forced to  rebrand Zica due to the outbreak of a deadly virus by the same name in Latin America, Tata Motors used Twitter to crowdsource the new brand name, which is how the car came to be called Tiago. As the platform’s popularity rises, more brands are likely to queue up for their hashtags.

#campaigns: An increasing number of brands are taking to Twitter to get their word across 

KingFisher:  A customised solution called ‘Name Targeting’ was devised in collaboration between the brand and Twitter. This involved sending out personalised videos of six partner teams at IPL  from @kingfisherworld with the names of the fans tagged. Twitter says over 85,000 IPL fans were reached

Nestle KitKat: The brand did a Twitter Trend block for five days. This means blocking the # space and changing the copy through the day to reflect real-time conversations. Influencers and famous Twitter users like Amitabh Bachchan were also roped in to maximise engagement

Tata Motors: Rebranded its car Zica after the Zika virus broke out in January. It ran a campaign on Twitter where the senior leadership encouraged people across the world to help them choose a new brand name. Three names were shortlisted through a poll and finally Tiago was the winner

Hyundai: Hyundai launched a new SUV, the Tucson using the platform’s ‘First View’ option with the #BornDynamic hashtag. They ran a contest asking followers what made them dynamic and the best answers were integrated with the hashtag of the day