Instagram attracting more advertising than Twitter

San Francisco, June 10: Advertising agencies are for the first time turning to Instagram more frequently than Twitter for social media ad campaigns, a survey released Thursday showed, a further indication of weakness in an ad sales operation that has been one of the few bright spots for Twitter.

The survey, from a unit of Comcast called Strata, came the same week Twitter said its head of product, who took over the team in September, was leaving. The research firm eMarketer said earlier this month that Snapchat was on pace to surpass Twitter in US active users, highlighting the threat Twitter faces from faster-growing competitors.

Amid Twitter’s ongoing struggles with stagnant user growth, management turmoil and a tumbling stock price, the advertising operations under chief operating office Adam Bain had been a relative oasis of stability. Bain, who joined the company in 2010, helped build Twitter from scratch to more than $1 billion revenue in just over three years.

But cracks in the ad business began to emerge in the company’s first-quarter earnings report, in which it missed its numbers due to weaker-thanexpected spending by big advertisers and provided a weak revenue forecast. The stock has fallen 15% since the April ear nings announcement and closed Wednesday at $14.60. Reuters

San Francisco, June 10: Twitter said some of its accounts were locked to prevent potential disclosures from hacks of other websites that may have leaked login credentials on the internet. Users whose accounts may be vulnerable were notified and told they must reset their passwords to gain access to the social messaging service, Twitter said Thursday in a blog post from Michael Coates, trust and information security officer. “In each of the recent password disclosures, we crosschecked the data with our records,” Coates said in the post. “As a result, a number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection.” In the post, Coates said the company is “confident the information was not obtained from a hack of Twitter’s servers.” Bloomberg