Fleets, Twitter’s content disappearing for “momentary thoughts”, looks even more like the Stories feature of its rivals, thanks to a new ad experience launched on Tuesday.
Justin Hoang, senior product manager on Twitter, and Austin Evers, global product marketing manager, likened the ads to “billboards” in a blog post revealing the test.
“Appearing between fleets of people sharing photos of the Fort Funston Dog Park or a video of their morning stroll over coffee in Williamsburg, the fleet ads are meant to tie your message to the everyday,” they wrote. “Fleet announcements are a space for brands to be creative: go behind the scenes, have a designer take over your account, or share a hot shot. “
But unlike typical billboards, which are sold to any business and visible to the public, the reach is much narrower, with only a handful of advertisers and a limited audience of US mobile users.
What they will see are fullscreen vertical fleet ads set at 9:16 aspect ratio with photos or videos up to 30 seconds long. Businesses can also include a “swipe up” call-to-action, so viewers can do things like buy featured products or get more information. They also get data on the performance of their fleet campaigns, including impressions, profile visits, clicks, website visits, and other details like video metrics like views, starts. , completions, etc.
The fleets just launched last November, so the company is still figuring out who uses it and how. But there are some things that Hoang and Evers seem sure about: People love content, as well as those types of vertical ads.
“We know from research that over 75% of people say they like ads in this format and among those who use fleets, 73% of people say they browse what others are sharing,” they said. in the blog, adding the company tries to make sure that the placements don’t appear intrusive.
Regardless, Twitter seems determined to develop the feature into a more robust offering and a potential revenue generator – which is notable, given how slow the main platform itself is to monetize. It took a few years for Twitter to mature from its inception in 2006 to experiment with advertising, and even more to officially launch ads in 2013.
Today, the company is seeing its ad stake increasing, with ad revenue of $ 899 million reported in the first quarter of 2021. According to Twitter, its advertising activity has jumped 32% in one year. That’s not entirely surprising, considering how the pandemic has boosted online engagement across major social media platforms and online marketplaces.
But in essence, the platform is still catching up to its younger competition. While it may be older than Instagram and Snapchat, the latter’s Stories features have been serving ads for four years and seven years, respectively.
Twitter seems more eager to keep up lately, at least in terms of development, whether it’s running Spaces, its variation on the audio-only platform Clubhouse, or encouraging civility in. social media by forcing users to pause and rethink potentially offensive tweets. And, like other platforms, it touts support for the creator community with a new feature that allows users to tip people for the content they like.
According to the company, this does not take a share of donations made through the Tip Jar feature. Maybe it never will, especially if it launches paid subscriptions, as Twitter pundits have been expecting for some time now. Or if he manages to advertise Fleet for something more than fleeting.
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