Twitter marketing solutions & audience insights from India

Twitter India outlines how the platform has been working towards enabling brands to leverage conversations, Twitter’s ad formats, marketing tools, and creative innovation to deliver performance-efficient campaigns.

At Twitter's Durability Press Event, Preetha Athrey, Krishna Iyer, Rishabh Sharma, Amrita Tripathi, and Kanika Mittal explained the strength of the Twitter Audience, conversation trends, business and marketing solutions provided by the platform, collaboration programs offered, and how brands can stay relevant by connecting with their audiences in real-time.

Conversational Layer Of The Internet

Twitter is about what’s happening in the world, and its audiences are the first to talk about things. With numerous changes in the world over the past 18 months, conversations on Twitter have also grown and diversified. Preetha Athrey, Head of Marketing at Twitter in India, spoke about the recent Twitter Trends Report - India which outlines six key conversation trends that are shaping culture in India - Wellbeing, Creator Culture, Everyday Wonder, One Planet, Tech Life, and My Identity. These insights into what people are talking about let brands stay ahead of what’s happening and stay connected with the people on Twitter with relevant marketing campaigns.

Twitter Audience

People on Twitter are receptive, participative and their conversations influence culture. They are open, ready to discover and engage. Krishna Iyer, Head of Agency, Twitter India explained that Twitter’s audiences are especially passionate about video. These audiences are capable of driving results for brands: showing 17% growth in brand awareness life for video viewers, 35% year-on-year growth in global ad engagements, and 40% growth in delivering higher ROI as compared to other social channels.

In addition to being receptive and participative, Twitter’s audiences also carry a range of interests such as tech (65%), music (60%), sports (59%), food & drinks (56%), science (54%) and travel (53%). Passionate, interest-based communities are, in a way, the heartbeat of Twitter in India.

Twitter Tools

Krishna went on to share that 71% of people rate Twitter as a good/great platform for engagement as compared to other social media channels. Owing to that, several new-age “disruptor” brands have been using Twitter’s ecosystem to establish audience connect. Twitter’s ad products suite packaged plus its audiences create a launchpad for new and upcoming brands. Some of these include fintech brands like Teji Mandi, consumer wearables like boAt, regional OTTs such as Aha Video, and more.

Twitter also supports brands with creative services from ArtHouse that help brands elevate content when launching something new or connecting with what’s happening in culture. ArtHouse’s three key offerings are influencer campaigns, artist collaborations, and editing & optimization of existing brand assets.

Also Read: Twitter Trends Report: 6 keywords that are driving conversations

Launching & Connect

Twitter Next is the in-house brand strategy team that works with brands to create human-centric ideas. Rishabh Sharma, Head of Twitter Next - India, explained that while Twitter helps brands achieve a wide range of goals, these can be broadly classified into launching something new and connecting with what’s happening.

“Launch” is defined as building awareness and interest for something new. Brand launches on Twitter are capable of driving 83% higher brand recall and 18% higher brand awareness. An example of launching on Twitter with engagement-driven impact was the Speed Challenge by Skoda - a game format, custom-created to engage customers around the introduction of Skoda's new launch.

Brands also come to Twitter to introduce offerings that cater to regional communities and audiences. Recently, Spotify India leveraged Twitter to reach out to audiences in South India to create awareness and engagement around their new offerings - #TheRJBalajiPodcast.

“Connect” is defined as building relevance by being part of real-time conversations on the service. During major live events, audiences spend 22% more time on Twitter than other social media platforms. Spending on Twitter ads makes a brand 88% more likely to be perceived as culturally relevant, according to Twitter Study. Netflix India’s #NetflixMatchmaker campaign, which offered customized content suggestions to audiences in response to an emoji, is one of the examples of an insight-based connect campaign - letting the OTT giant participate in the audience’s search for their next big binge.

Amplify Sponsorships

Amrita Tripathi, Head of Content Partnerships at Twitter India, shared how brands can leverage the power of video through Twitter’s Amplify Sponsorships. Amplify Sponsorships let brands align with premium video content from the top, most relevant publishers that the brand’s target audience is already engaging with. This content is intended to be brand-safe, and also lets brands borrow the publisher’s equity along with an extended audience.

Amplify Sponsorships help brands drive 68% higher campaign awareness and 24% higher message association, and can be leveraged in multiple formats - Pre-roll, Promoted Ads, Twitter Live, and several other ad products. Intel India has leveraged Amplify Sponsorships via co-branded content on Twitter. Microsoft India too optimized Sponsorships to boost its Share of Voice on data security and AI.

Full-funnel Growth

Kanika Mittal, Business Head, Twitter India, spoke about how Twitter can help brands create a full-funnel impact and drive conversions via conversations. Recently, Twitter revamped its advertising products suite to simplify these formats for brands and advertisers. From 22+ ad formats, the team narrowed down to five broader categories: Promoted Ads, Followers Ads, Twitter Takeover, Twitter Amplify, and Twitter Live. You can read more about these here.

With the right combination of products, brands can drive awareness and interest, inspire consideration and intent, as well as lead to conversions. Twitter’s premium products, takeover products (First view + Promoted Trend Spotlight) combine to create campaigns with the objective of high-reach, high-impact launch package, producing our biggest 24-hour reach ever, with up to 120 million video impressions over 24 hours, capitalizing on the growth and delivering a 76% higher ad recall for our customers. Other ad-products that have been bolstering brand conversations are Branded Notifications, Conversation Button, and Polls.

Performance has been a focus for Twitter in 2021, and the team has been working towards strengthening performance by building new formats and improving existing ones. Recent improvements to Twitter’s Mobile App Promotion (MAP) tools have delivered a 24% average increase in installs per impression. Click-to-land rates have also improved with Twitter’s Click-ID delivering 10X more site visits.