Social media platform Twitter is great for certain segments of the market, however David Higgins, social media marketing manager at Foxtel, says the platform needs to do some work to compete with Facebook.
“I think Twitter probably has work to do if it’s going to challenge Facebook in Australia to become a broad mass market advertising platform,” he told B&T at Forrester’s Summit in Sydney yesterday, speaking from his personal social media opinion, rather than from Foxtel’s viewpoint. B&T has contacted Twitter for comment but had not heard back at the time of publication.
Because Facebook is so dominant in Australia, said Higgins, he’s found the advertising Foxtel does on Zuckerberg’s platform and the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram is highly effective for its audience.
“I personally haven’t found other platforms like Twitter or Tumblr to give us anywhere near the value that we get in terms of cost per click or cost per view that we see with Facebook,” he said.
“But I would say, those platforms like Tumblr and Twitter have market segments that they will outperform other platforms on,” such as the leadership spill which had thousands of people tweeting and being the place the former Labor leaders gave their congratulations on Malcolm Turnbull becoming the new Prime Minister.
For Higgins, a former journo himself, Twitter is the best place to cover a news story from.
And he added: “If you think about publishing entertainment content towards young people, probably Tumblr is the number one place to get to those people.”
It comes down to the fact Twitter needs to build up its audience, said Higgins, suggesting the platform needs to do a big and bold move.
“In my view, Twitter needs to replace the famous timeline that contains all the tweets with an algorithm-guided interface that delivers Tweets relevant to you,” he said, as the current stack of tweets can be “overwhelming” for users.
He noted that while Facebook’s and Instagram’s platforms work really well for Foxtel’s content – because they have a lot of videos – the business is constantly shifting the marketing money around various platforms depending on the campaign needs.
“At the moment we’re finding video advertising on Facebook to give us a very good result,” he said. “And so during the course of that, yes, we’ll probably spend less on Twitter than we would on Facebook in recent campaigns we’ve been running.
“That’s not to say we’re investing less necessarily in Twitter over the longer term, we still see Twitter as a strong place for certain markets,” he stressed, reiterating the company will continue to use Twitter.
“If you’re advertising towards diverse and discerning markets, people who might be interesting in our documentary channels, we see good results from that.
“But I don’t think anyone in Australia is going to argue against Facebook being the number one platform for social advertising at the moment.”
