WHY CANADA IS A TOP TESTING GROUND FOR TWITTER.
TORONTO• After 10 years, Twitter Inc. has a good idea of what works on its platform. What may be a surprise is that a lot of what it has learned, it learned from its Canadian users.
“When we think about Twitter back at HQ, it is known as an incredible source of creativity, especially in business,” Adam Bain, the company’s chief operating officer, said during an interview at Twitter’s Toronto office. “Some of the best advertising campaigns that we’ve seen across the world actually got their start here.”
The Canadian Football League, for example, used Vine — a video product owned by Twitter — to unveil new uniforms. Tostitos did a campaign where users could tweet any food ingredient to the company and then be matched with a recipe for, say, a salsa. Or an observatory at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax lets users tweet the name of something in space, such as the Orion Nebula, then get an image of it right back.
“We also see it in civics,” said Bain. “Certainly the prime minister has been a real model for the world in terms of communicating to constituents and the world through Twitter.”
Canadians also tend to be early adopters of social media, mobile and video trends — more video is consumed per capita here than in any other part of the world. “There is something about the Canadian audience that makes them uniquely passionate about video,” Bain said.
Video has become increasingly important for Twitter as it struggles with profitability. In April, the company reported lower- thanexpected revenue for i ts first quarter due to weaker spending by advertisers, causing Twitter’s stock to continue its sliding trend.
Last year saw stagnant user growth for the company and earlier this month it was reported that Snapchat might have even passed the site for monthly daily active users. The company also lost four executives in January and two more in May.
The company hopes the changes it’ s making will cause a turn around for these problems. Twitter has tweaked its timeline’s algorithm to show more relevant tweets first, it has integrated Periscope into Twitter natively for live video support and it’s trying to make the 140-character limits less confusing by softening the rules.
Bain said he thinks the changes are helping.
“We are seeing good growth overall,” he said. “This last quarter we saw returning growth overall for five million monthly active users, directly attributable to some of the product work that is happening within the company.”
In April, the company announced a partnership with the National Football League to live stream Thursday Night Football games as a way to build on the global influx of video consumption with “premium” content. Bain said it is the first in a series of partnerships around live streaming.
“It falls under a model that we’ve set up at Twitter to be an amplifier and partner to traditional media instead of walking in and trying to fully disrupt that ecosystem,” he added.
Canada is not currently part of the NFL deal because of broadcast rights — though the company “is working on it,” according to Twitter Canada’s new managing director Rory Capern, who took over for Kirstine Stewart in February.
Capern pointed to Twitter’s partnership with Samsung to live tweet video highlights of the Toronto Raptors during the National Basketball League’s Eastern Conference Finals — or a deal with Bell Media to enhance this month’s iHeartRadio Much Music Video Awards, which includes a category for Vine creators — as examples of where Twitter thinks it can have an impact.
Canada has “about 13 million people that access Twitter” and its various services each month, Bain said. That number rises to 20 million if you include its businessto-business reach through things such as ad and app networks.
Twitter has a very specific road map for the future for growth, Bain said, focused around five core elements: refining “iconic” products (such as Twitter itself ), building up live video, helping the creators grow, assisting developers and improving user safety.
Canada will continue to provide inspiration, he added. “I constantly am able to come back and talk about Canadian examples that we’re exporting across the rest of the world,” he said.
“It’s a neat source of creative innovation that I think is unique to the Canadian market and unique to the talent that exists here.”