Does Twitter Need A Real TV Advertising Campaign?

How to get more people to use Twitter?  Supposedly some 320 million people are active monthly users. So, what are we missing here? The easy, overarching answer: regular engagement.

Twitter’s stock was down 10% to $28.13 in its third quarter. While it reported $569 million in quarterly revenue — pretty much as expected — it warned of weaker revenue numbers to come.

Maybe Twitter needs something more basic, like a TV advertising campaign.

No, this wouldn’t solve everything — like decreasing demand among advertisers, according to company officials. But sending out a message on some simple ways to use Twitter might help to ignite things.  

Michael Graham, stock market analyst at Canaccord Genuity, told CNBC about Twitter: “It’s one thing to get people exposed to your product, it’s another to keep them engaged… criticism over the years is that it is hard for the layperson to engage with it.”

Now, do you think older, traditional media like print, radio or TV networks has problems with the lay person engaging on their platforms? Nope. Though there is media fragmentation, those platforms are still easy to use.

Apparently, Twitter is not. Maybe traditional TV advertising can help.

You might think Twitter and Facebook already had soaring brand awareness levels. Almost every TV show has some social media tag attached. So why advertise?

Because when looking to engage a broad number of media consumers — young and old, savvy or not — it needs to simply explain the benefit in using Twitter much more — on a daily or even weekly basis.

And what big media platform can promote a broad message to do that? Well, duh.

A media critique by Wayne Friedman
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost.