Twitter's IPO Is Exciting, But Will Twitter Ever Become More Than A Niche Social Network?

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As Twitter Nears Its IPO, Is Its Mainstream Potential Over-Hyped?
Twitter filed an S-1 yesterday, its first step in going public. That means Twitter will now be the focus of major mainstream news media and briefly seem like its taking over the world. Twitter has undeniably been smart in building up its ad business, but there are questions over whether it's already a bit over-hyped. All Things D published a story putting its user numbers at 240 million worldwide. That's not bad, but that puts it roughly in the same league as rival social media and messaging services like Google+, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. Recent surveys of U.S. social media usage, such as the Pew Center's, find that Twitter is only used by 17% of the U.S. population, and at BI Intelligence we've published data showing that Google+ has overtaken Twitter in U.S. audience numbers. Social media is not just about audience, it's also about engagement and the quality of that engagement. But it's worth remembering past concerns about whether Twitter is a fairly narrow technology beloved of power users, and whether it will ever go truly mainstream.

Here are some other links about Twitter's IPO:

How Much Is Twitter Really Worth (Business Insider)
Inside Twitter's Plan To Go Public (Quartz)
Twitter Timeline (Wall Street Journal)

Women Are Dominating Social Media (Pew Research)
On average, the proportion of women who use social media is greater than that of men by an 8 percentage point gap. Women also tend to use Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram in significantly greater proportions than men. On Twitter and Tumblr the proportion is nearly even (18% Of American men use Twitter). In contrast, Reddit sees a greater proportion of men than women. Read >

How To Win On Google+: Five Strategies From Top Brands (SumAll)
The Google+ landscape is still a mystery to many brands. Below is a list detailing what top brands are doing to market themselves on the social network.

1. Nike - provides balanced coverage of each sport they are affiliated with to keep things interesting and cater to the network's mostly male audience.

2. Sephora - makes full use of Google+ multimedia capabilities by posting GIFs, Vine videos, and pictures of products. The company also hosts Google Hangouts.

3. H&M - avoids linking to the products in their posts in order to build audience trust and engagement; they post because the content is interesting to their audience, not because they want the audience to buy products.

4. Angry Birds - produces Google+ exclusive content to excite their audience and make them feel special.

5. BMW - creates an aesthetic experience for its audience by posting high-quality visual content that stands out in newsfeeds

Read >

Twitter Files For Its IPO (Business Insider)
Here's Business Insider's main story yesterday on Twitter's IPO announcement, in case you missed it. Read >

Facebook Encourages Developers To Build Facebook Apps (ReadWrite)
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's ongoing strategy is to get app developers to integrate their apps into Facebook at multiple levels. The goal is to make Facebook a necessary part of the app ecosystem. Tinder, a mobile dating app which requires users to log-in with and use profile pictures from Facebook, is a good example of this. Read >

iOS 7 Boosts Social Media In More Ways Than One (ReadWrite)
iOS 7 will speed up the load time of social applications by 11 percent, this amounts to about three seconds. In addition, the new iPhone will refresh feeds in social media apps even when users are not actively using those apps. Finally, Safari will now have a Shared Links feature which gives users a feed of links shared by Twitter users whom they follow. Read >

LinkedIn Goes To College ... So Does Your Mom (Fortune)
Today LinkedIn will launch LinkedIn University Pages. People younger than 18 will now be able to join LinkedIn and explore colleges and universities that they wish to attend by connecting with staff and alumni. Read >

'Social Media Manager' May Not Be A Job For Much Longer (Quartz)
According to data from Indeed, job postings with "social media" in the title increased by 50 percent over the last year. In recent years, postings grew twice as fast. In contrast, positions with "social media" in the description, but not the title, grew at a rate of 89 percent. One explanation for this could be that the need for social media savvy is becoming distributed across organizations, as opposed to being centralized in one department. Read >

INFOGRAPHIC: Job Seekers Find Success Using Social Media (Mashable)
The infographic below shows that companies using social recruitment strategies saw significant improvements in the quality, quantity, and the time it took to hire candidates as well as the number of employee referrals the company recieved. The data comes from a recently released survey from Jobvite. Read >