Twitter jumped 8.4% to $69.96 at the close in New York after rising 7.5% yesterday. The stock has surged 169% since going public at $26 on Nov. 6, giving Twitter a market value of almost $40 billion — larger than Time Warner Cable Inc., media company Viacom Inc. and retailer Target Corp.

Investors are betting San Francisco-based Twitter can attract more ad dollars, as companies seek to market their wares through wireless devices and tie-ins with television programming. As the unprofitable company’s sales growth outpaces that of competitors such as Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., the stock has “graduated to cult status,” according to Blake Harper, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities Inc. in Baltimore.

“While the company is growing revenues faster than its fastest-growing peers and we do recognize the potential for the company to capture larger portions of the mobile and TV advertising market, it appears valuation metrics are irrelevant and that investors are betting aggressively on Twitter being the next great media-technology platform,” Harper, who recommends selling the stock, wrote in a note Tuesday.

“We don’t believe the current valuation justifies the risk,” wrote Harper, whose price target for Twitter is $34. “Especially with the company having yet to report a quarter as a public company.”

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Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Source : Mashable 

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The brand will run such ads before videos from Fox shows including Glee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and So You Think You Can Dance, among other shows, Jean Rossi, EVP of sales for Fox Broadcasting, told Variety. The first such ads launched last week.

Twitter began running Fox clips as part of Amplify, a program that brought sponsored clips to users’ news feeds in May. As Gawker points out, that means that the AmEx ads are, in effect, ads on top of ads.

Though Twitter’s IPO was considered successful, the company is not expected to post a profit until 2015 at the earliest. Since the company’s main source of revenues comes from advertising, Twitter has to walk a fine line between pleasing advertisers without compromising the user experience.

Twitter’s recent expansion of photos in timelines was one recent test of this middle path as Promoted Tweets suddenly got more real estate in the feed. Twitter isn’t alone in testing the boundaries for users’ tolerance for advertising; Instagram also recently introduced ads and Google has been testing banner ads for brand searches.

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Image: Getty/ David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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A new tool, offered through Twitter’s API, allows marketers to send targeted tweets to specific geographic locations. For example, a brand could send a tweet to followers in the United States and a separate tweet to users in Japan from the same account. The tweets will not show up to followers in the brand’s Twitter timeline unless those followers reside in the country targeted.

This capability makes it possible for brands to consolidate their Twitter accounts, eliminating the need for different accounts for various countries or languages. It also lets brand target messages more directly to consumers by sending offers or promotions to followers in a specific region or create customized content for a specific country.

With roughly 77% of Twitter’s monthly active users located outside of the U.S., the ability for brands to connect with international users will be key to helping Twitter continually grow its advertising revenue moving forward.

The ability to geo-target messages is available to partners with access to Twitter’s Ads API, which was updated a few weeks ago. London-based TBG, a social media ad management company, first rolled out a country-specific tweeting tool on Oct. 4, although its customers aren’t utilizing the feature yet, according to a spokesperson.

Last week, Austin-based Spredfast, which offers tools that allow clients to better manage multiple social media accounts, became the first U.S.-based company to offer geo-targeted tweets.

“We think this is just the start,” said Jim Rudden, CMO of Spredfast. “The whole focus is on, ‘How do we get relevance in the news feed?’ The more targeted you can get, the better.”

For brands, the benefit is minimizing the number of social accounts to manage, creating a more direct funnel for consumer feedback. Brands would no longer need to manage or monitor regional Twitter handles; all messaging would come from the same account, so all feedback, comments or complaints would be directed to the same place.

However, compacting a brand’s Twitter handles also means consolidating a brand’s current followers and convincing users to follow a different Twitter handle (the brand’s main one).

TBG hopes brands will be willing to look past this issue, even if the process of shifting to a single account takes six months to a year.

“[One handle] is more efficient and it makes it easier for users to find you,” said Ian Cassidy, TBG’s executive creative director, in a statement to Mashable. “It also means that brands that have a global Twitter account can test localized, more specific messaging in different countries, which should increase engagement.”

As brands start to test out this new technology in the coming months, we’ll find out exactly how specific those messages can get.

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Image: Mashable composite; Flickr, Kevin M. Gill

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Twitter, which announced the move on its blog on Thursday, illustrated the upgrade with this Aug. 11 tweet from astronaut Chris Hadfield:

Good morning! Perspective – Sunday is a fine day to go for a walk with a friend. pic.twitter.com/P3uDfjYsEU

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) August 11, 2013

“As you can see from @CMDR_Hatfield’s Tweet embedded above, we’ve put the photo front and center, with a bigger and bold visual focus on the media,” Brian Ellin, Twitter’s project manager, platform, wrote in the blog post. “Both landscape and portrait photos now have more room to show their pixels when the Tweets are embedded online.”

Reemerging into society after backpacking ~35 miles through Yosemite’s Grand Canyon of Tuolumne River. My legs hurt. pic.twitter.com/TkjNgKn6b8

— Bill Couch (@couch) July 7, 2013

Improving the photo experience make them more viable for inclusion in articles now that there’s competition from Facebook. Facebook’s embeds came as the company was revving up its real-time marketing opportunities (shortly before, the company introduced hashtags). Instagram, a unit of Facebook, launched embedded posts in July, shortly before Facebook did the same. Instagram’s embeds include video as well as photos. Twitter’s Vine videos are also embeddable.

For a short period, Facebook had not only caught up with Twitter, but also surpassed it by letting news organizations run richer embeds in their stories. Now, the two appear to be on equal footing.

Image: Mary Turner/Getty Images

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What’s notable is that these spammers weren’t sending tweets or direct messages. Instead, they made use of Twitter’s list function, adding people to various lists and indirectly pointing thousands of users toward spam sites.

Lists are typically used to organize Twitter users into more distinct groups. You might have separate lists for celebrities, colleagues and friends, which allows you to monitor several different streams at the same time through tools like TweetDeck. A few months back, Twitter increased the number of lists each user can have from 20 to 1,000 and the maximum number of accounts in each list from 500 to 5,000.

While not entirely new, as noted by BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel, it’s a capability that is now being abused by spammers, who are adding users to lists populated with links en masse. Each time you’re added to a list, you get a notification on Twitter and perhaps via email. Naturally, you’ll be keen to find out why you were added to the list and, spammers hope, click their links.

One of the biggest offenders in the current wave was an account called Celeb Phone Numbers. Before Twitter suspended it, the account automatically added tens of thousands of users to lists. It promised to reveal the phone numbers of stars like One Direction singer Tomlinson and Lady Gaga through an associated website.

Warzel reported the person behind the Celeb Phone Numbers account used a Twitter keyword marketing tool to find people who had tweeted about those stars and added them to its lists. That person shared their finding on marketing forums, spurring other spammers to try the tactic. The spammers make money if you complete surveys or view ads on their sites.

The Celeb Phone Numbers account was immediately reported as spam by many users Sunday night:

you cant spam add me to your list now can u pic.twitter.com/sStoEvemkE

— katie (@seasidenouis) September 15, 2013

Twitter is fighting a war against spammers. A study published last month showed how vendors created thousands of phony accounts and sold them to spammers wholesale. Twitter is adding the researchers’ methods for finding such accounts into its abuse-detection systems. Tracking down and killing spam accounts is a high priority as the company prepares to hold an initial public stock offering.

Image: Andy Melton

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