Last October, Twitter held its first ever mobile developer's conference, called Flight. The event was so successful that Twitter announced plans to make an annual occurrence - and they've followed through, with the website for Twitter Flight 2015 now taking bookings and showcasing some of the key sessions and discussions being held in San Francisco on the 21st of October. But what's of particular interest is what the sessions reveal about Twitter's areas of focus and where the platform is headed - here are some of the highlights.
Growing and Monetizing Your App Using Twitter
Twitter recently announced the re-branding of the Twitter Publisher Network to the 'Twitter Audience Platform', along with a range of new options for Twitter advertisers to increase the reach of their ads to apps via the MoPub platform. This Main Hall session, hosted by MoPub's Head of Channel Partnerships John Egan, looks at how Twitter advertisers can better utilize MoPub's app reach to enhance their Twitter advertising strategies.
It's pretty clear that Twitter needs to improve their monetization efforts, and MoPub, which reaches more than a billion unique devices through apps each month, is a key component of their strategy. The inclusion a specific session on MoPub, in the conference's Main Hall, underlines the importance of this element in Twitter's overall strategy, and that they see significant opportunity in their enhanced offerings, enabling advertisers to expand the reach of their Twitter marketing efforts into the growing mobile eco-system.
Up Periscope
Live-streaming has become the thing in social media marketing circles in recent months, so it's no surprise to see Periscope also gets a run on the main stage. Periscope CEO and Founder Kayvon Beykpour and Periscope Client Engineering Lead Sara Haider will go through the story behind Periscope, how it was developed and created, and, importantly, where it's headed from here.
Periscope released its first report on user numbers this month, highlighting the platform's impressive growth, with 1.9 million daily active users watching more than 40 years worth of live-streaming content on the platform every 24 hours. That said, the amount of users actually broadcasting content on the platform is incredibly low - only 2.83% of Periscope users are actually creating and broadcasting content. Does that mean the process of live-streaming only appeals to certain users, or does it underline significant opportunity? 1.9 million users signifies a clear demand, with only a tiny amount of providers actually catering to it.
Live-streaming is definitely an offering that will be a great fit for many brands - it'll be interesting to hear how Periscope plans to expand upon their initial hype and convert that audience into a sustainable revenue stream.
Uses and Products Built with Twitter Data
Data is a key area of focus for Twitter. With over half a billion tweets created per day, the platform provides a real-time pulse of world's issues and news. As such, there's a whole stream at Flight dedicated to data utilization, including input from Mark Callahan from Gnip, who'll go over how organizations are using Twitter data to make decisions and solve problems, and Brian Lehman from Twitter, who'll discuss how to rationalize and organize Twitter insights.
But the most interesting looking session in this stream is Diana Abbas' session looking at how social data and APIs are being used to build products and assist the professional lives of Twitter clients. Abbas will discuss enhancements they've made to their data products and will profile the various data products and how customers can benefit from their use.
Twitter has sometimes struggled to highlight the benefits and strengths of its data and data products, many brands don't realize the level of insight that can be gleaned from their vast collection of 140-character missives. This session is interesting in that it'll hopefully highlight the specifics of how Twitter is working to enhance greater understanding of their data offerings, and how clients and partners can boost their audience understanding and marketing performance as a result.
Probabilistic Data Aggregation
Another interesting looking data session will examine how to understand the demographics of large sets of users and apply those learnings to marketing and advertising processes. Jason Carey will discuss the power of Twitter's data insights in this regard, as well as the tools they've developed to help users work with it.
Research has shown that Twitter data can predict flu outbreaks and stock market fluctuations - harnessing this info hold massive potential. Hopefully this session will break down some of the ways to reach similar conclusions related to more brand-specific queries and datasets.
Keeping the Twitter Platform Safe
One addition that I found particularly interesting was a presentation focussed specifically on how Twitter is working to improve safety on the platform. In this session, hosted by Lingfeng Guan and Alex Wu, Twitter will present BotMaker, 'a scalable system that defends against unsolicited content and behavior'. BotMaker filters out spam before it enters the Twitter system, and initial testing of the service has lead to significant progress in reducing unwanted content from the network.
The impact of BotMaker on Twitter spam
According to Twitter, 'BotMaker has ushered in a new era of fighting spam' on the platform, and the lessons learned from the project could also extend to other elements, including the detection of other unwanted content on the network.
The speakers will provide insight into how they protect the platform against suspicious app behaviors, as well as best practices for making secure apps.
Mapping Millions of Tweets
Geo-tagging holds major potential - the ability to filter and sort tweets by region enables a whole new range of insight for advertisers and marketers, helping to better rationalize and focus on the Twitter conversations most relevant to their brand and outreach efforts.
In this session, Eric Fischer of Mapbox, an open source mapping platform for custom designed maps, will discuss 'retrieving tweets from the Twitter Streaming API, despeckling, debanding, and de-duplicating the data to reduce distracting artifacts, generating vector map tiles with Tippecanoe, and styling the map with Mapbox Studio, along with some highlights of the resulting map.'
Some of Mapbox's data presentations are really amazing, it'll be interesting to see how they utilize Twitter's resources to create their visualisations, and what notes they present that might help others better refine and clean up their own Twitter data.
Focussing Your Attention
The key areas Twitter looks to be focussing on at Flight are the opportunities for multi-platform marketing through MoPub's app reach, the benefits and processes of utilizing Twitter's vast amounts of real-time data, and the future potential of new additions like live-streaming. That said, there are also an additional six sessions which are marked as 'secret', which Twitter will reveal on the date. You'd expect that at least one of these will discuss Project Lightning, but they may also unveil new offerings and products that haven't even been suggested as yet. Anything that increases the utilization and functionality of Twitter's data is a plus - it's one of the platform's greatest strengths and one which they've thus far been unable to successfully highlight in ways that will win significant marketing dollars.
The hope, with Flight, is that we see more ways in which marketers and advertisers can better access and capitalize on the platform's unique strengths. The sessions point to these, but the level of insight provided remains to be seen.
Registration for Twitter Flight is now open! Join us on October 21 in SF. http://t.co/AV0TMSwIeI pic.twitter.com/RdaX2ck3Or
- Twitter Flight (@Flight) August 27, 2015