Twitter admits it needs ‘clear brand proposition’ to boost usage, and the CFO is the man to do it
After putting its CFO, Anthony Noto, in charge of marketing, Twitter has admitted it needs to establish a ‘clear brand proposition’ as it looks to ‘close the gap’ between brand awareness and usage.
Speaking at the J.P. Morgan global technology, media and telecom conference yesterday (20 May), Noto confirmed he is now in charge of marketing.
He said the decision was made to “elevate the importance of marketing” at board level and make it a “key component of everything we do”.
“Marketing really needs to permeate product, it needs to permeate content and it needs to permeate media,” he added.
Defining the brand proposition
The social platform has 90% global brand awareness, according to Noto, but that hasn’t translated into usage. He said Twitter has less than 30% penetration of the social and digital mobile market.
Up until now Twitter hasn’t used advertising to establish its “value proposition”. However it is trying to change that by addressing the top two reasons consumers aren’t using the platform – because they don’t understand the purpose or don’t know how to use it.
“We’re trying to solve those two issues and make the product appealing to everyone and make it daily use,” Noto said.
Noto didn’t rule out a broadcast advertising push but said the site is “very early in its thinking”.
What is doing is pushing features such as ‘instant timeline’ through product, content and marketing. In February, Twitter announced the introduction of instant timeline, a service set to appear on the social network’s homepage to show curated tweets to people that are not signed up, stretching to users who have stepped away from the service for a few hours.
“There’s not a tax that someone has to pay or an investment someone needs to make to use Twitter and converting that mindset from people thinking they have to tweet or they have to contribute to use Twitter to people thinking it’s frictionless, it’s easy, the real value proposition is the best real-time content in the world, we’ll go a long way to solving the opportunity to capture the opportunity in front of us,” he said.
Evolution in video
Noto said that now Twitter is also working on better integrating geographic information into ads to make them more targeted to consumers. It is also looking to “increase our market position in video” by innovating with auto play after launching native video in January and kicking off its Periscope live broadcasting app in March.
“Having live video is really differentiated, anyone can consume it…and that’s what Periscope is,” Noto said. “It’s a live broadcast and we think it’s the next way of evolution in video.”
