Twitter to develop curation tools as CEO reveals brands learning real-time social media lessons from US Presidential election campaigns
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has revealed that brands are learning lessons in real-time engagement on the platform through the US Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney's use of social media as well as revealing that the platform is seeking curation partners while developing new curation tools.
Speaking to IPA president Nicola Mendelsohn this morning at the IAB Engage conference, Costolo discussed the growth of the service, which he said now saw almost half a billion tweets a day, on some days more than that.
He added that Twitter was beginning to see brands learn lessons from the immediate interaction made by the Presidential campaigns, when asked to highlight a key difference he had seen since the last election four years ago.
The US Presidential campaign has seen Twitter play a key role, with the first election pulling in a peak of 159,000 tweets per minute.
“It’s changed the election this time..the candidates and their teams are providing some insight to real-time for brands. They have no time to wait to respond to what the opponent said. Now they have a discussion into the debate and engage…every time one of the candidates says something provocative there’s a Twitter account on that being launched within minutes and being retweeted....We’re starting to see brands look at that and learn lessons from that.”
When asked by Mendelsohn to offer advice to brands for using Twitter, he stated that they needed to have “an authentic tone of voice” adding “the more authentic the better.”
He continued to say that quirky tones of voice were found to be more attractive to users, but not if it seemed inauthentic.
He also highlight the “great things” being achieved by O2 for its customer service response and activity on Twitter.
Another significant piece of information from Costolo was his wish to create curation tools for events the service.
“The shared experience happens on Twitter,” he commented of the reaction of users through major events, such as the recent Japanese Tsunami.
“We want to develop tools to allow them to experience that together.”
As to the development of the tools, had added that the company would look to ‘third parties to create and manage the content for those.’