1200-Thurs-062421-PR-BO-TwitterForNews Beyond 280-Characters-FINAL
OOnline News AssociationJun 21, 2021 at 8:39 pm47min
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01:02Speaker 1
Hello, everybody, welcome to Twitter's session at RNA 21. We are so thrilled to be here with you today. We miss our RNA family so much. And we hope to see you all again soon. And we hope that you're all well and safe. Today we're here to talk about going beyond 280 characters. My name is Nikita Patel. And I oversee print and digital news partnerships at Twitter here in the US, my pronouns are she her, and I'm wearing a purple shirt because that's my favorite color. I'm also on our nice board of directors and chair of the online journalism awards. So hopefully you'll hear more about that later. I'm here with my co host today, Eric Zuckerman, who oversees broadcast news partnerships here in the US. You'll get to hear more from Eric shortly. So we have a great session lined up for you today, we're going to go through the 10 things that you need to know since we have been very busy at Twitter lately. We're gonna then talk about our long form content strategy, and then talk about spaces for newsrooms and journalists. So let's dive in. The first thing you need to know is about a brand new program that we just launched on World Press Freedom Day. It is called follow local journalists. Every single year on World Press Freedom Day, we Twitter always host some kind of global campaign where we're making sure that press freedom and conversations about journalism are top of mind. This year, we decided to use World Press Freedom Day as a springboard for our new initiative about local journalism. And a World Press Freedom Day. Our goal was to make sure that conversation about local journalists was top of mind. The reason we decided to come up with this program and launch it is because we firmly believe that local journalists deserve a national and a global spotlight. As part of this project, we launched a print campaign. Here you can see four page ad with a QR code that links to a Twitter list of local journalists around the country. We run these ads in 28 cities around the country across USA Today networks, newspapers, and mcclatchy newspapers. These ads are also accompanied by digital ads, which linked to each newsrooms Twitter list of their journalists also. Great news is that this whole campaign didn't drive a ton of conversation on Twitter, we saw conversation about wild Press Freedom Day and tweets, over 95% more year over year. Of all the conversation about World Press Freedom Day, we saw an increase of 40%. Going beyond conversation was the sentiment to we were helping to drive positive conversation. Positive to neutral conversation and sentiment about follow local journalists was 98%. And most importantly, the main intent of this campaign on this day was to drive followers to local journalists. On well Press Freedom Day, journalists saw an uptick of 38% new followers than an average day on Twitter. So what is follow local journalists all about? Soon, you'll see profiles of local journalists and newsrooms on media.twitter.com. We'll be sharing more Twitter lesson at mentioning local journalists on Twitter news. You'll see spaces where I plan to have spaces with local journalists and encourage them to do so also. We'll also continue the drumbeat of trainings that we do with local newsrooms and journalists, and of course industry events. One of the reasons why we're here today at RNA is to connect with all of you. And we'll be discussing follow local journalists and implementing various things and other key industry events throughout the year. The second thing that you need to know is about verification. This is everybody's favorite topic. Hopefully you all know that we opened up public verification a few weeks ago. So now anyone that wants to be verified, can apply in app themselves as long as they meet the guidelines. Don't fret if you don't have this in your app yet. This is rolling out slowly. So hopefully, you'll have this soon. If you haven't used this and apply and hit any bumps in the road, don't worry, then too, you can also reach out to your social teams, your audience teams, the chances are that they're in touch with us, and we can help to triage issues. The third thing to know is a project called bird watch that we recently launched. In terms of our misinformation roadmap. As you may know, we started actioning on content towards the US elections and COVID-19 when it comes to misinformation. Now with this new program with burdwan, we're taking a community driven approach to having users actually flag misleading content to us, for us to moderate.
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06:02Speaker 1
The fourth thing you need to know is article prompts. Here, as you can see, we have a prompt when you go to retweet an article to ensure that you've actually read it before retweeting it. As a result of this prompt. We've seen an uptick of 33% of people actually reading an article before they smash that retweet button, which is huge. The fifth thing that you need to know is all about Twitter spaces. This might be my favorite new feature on Twitter. If you haven't used Twitter basics, yet, I highly encourage it. It is basically a tool where you can have live audio conversations. Everybody should hopefully have access to Twitter spaces in terms of hosting a space and joining a space as a listener and becoming a speaker, both on iOS and Android. Eric is actually going to be discussing different ways that newsrooms and journalists can use Twitter spaces, and having a great conversation with our guests shortly. But now I'm going to pass off to Eric to finish off the 10 things that you need to know.
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07:04Speaker 2
Thanks so much Nikita. The sixth thing you need to know is Twitter blue. Twitter, blue is Twitter's first ever subscription offering, which gives power users access to premium features to help them customize their Twitter experience. So what are some of those features? The first one is undo tweet, does not edit tweet, it's undo tweet. If you ever typed a tweet, hit hit the tweet button and then immediately realized you had a typo. Or maybe you forgot to tag someone, or maybe you got the URL wrong. With undo tweet, you can set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to preview your tweet, click Undo and make changes to your tweet before it actually posts to your timeline and goes out to your followers. The second new feature is bookmark folders five years ago, if you wanted to come back to a tweet later, you would favorite then we changed phase two likes, we added bookmarks, but if you never cleared your bookmarks out, it just became a big infinite scroll. It's very hard to find an older bookmark. So the answer is bookmark folders, which lets you organize the tweets you've saved into folders so that when you need it, you can find it easily. And the third feature is reader mode reader mode provides a more beautiful reading experience for those long Twitter threads by turning them into a more seamless, easier to read format. These are just some of the new Twitter blue features we're currently testing now in Canada and Australia. Seventh thing you need to know is tip jar tip jar is a new way for people to give and receive support on Twitter by sending tips. Turning on tip jar adds an icon to your profile with links to external services such as PayPal Venmo, cash app, Patreon and bandcamp. All the payments happen off platform Twitter isn't involved and we take no cut. We're kicking this off with a few select creators, independent journalists and nonprofits. Right now brands businesses and media organizations are not yet eligible. The eighth thing you need to know is super follows. Super follows is a new monthly subscription model coming soon. That will help fans support and get closer to their favorite voices on Twitter. People who make them laugh or think or feel informed or inspired. Fans will be able to Super follow creators to get an extra level of access and conversation for a monthly fee. Number nine is review. Twitter recently acquired the company review review is a service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish and monetize editorial newsletters. We know that Twitter is where writers and publishers have built their loyal audiences and we believe it's also where they can grow their readership to a much larger scale, and connect with readers more seamlessly than anywhere else. And soon, people will be able to subscribe to your newsletter right from your Twitter profile. The 10 things you need to know is scroll. That's another reason acquisition scroll is built away to read articles without the ads, pop ups and other clutter that get in the way, cleaning up the reading experience and giving people what they want just the content. Scroll is a subscription service that removes ads from participating news sites. Meanwhile, the publishers who work with scroll can actually bring in more revenue than they would from the traditional ads on a page because they get a portion of the subscription fee. You'll be hearing a lot more about scroll and review, which are part of Twitter's new, long form strategy right now. I'm gonna turn it back over to Nikita.
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10:53Speaker 1
Thanks, Eric. Hi, everyone. I'm thrilled to host a conversation with my good friend Tony Hale. Tony, I'm so thrilled that you're now part of the flock. Welcome to Twitter. But is this your like, first month? How's everything going?
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11:08Speaker 3
It's good. Yes, I'm one month and six days into my time as a tweet. And it's a it's been a hugely fun bustle. Tell us about a little bit about your background and your career. Sure. So I, I spent my 20s in various nefarious things from polar expeditions to run all your races, which is why I'm optic Tony. On Twitter, I had no idea. At that point in time, I would end up getting a chance to work within Twitter. Then I found myself in startups and became the founding CEO back in 2009, of a company called chartbeat that provides analytics to much of the major media companies. And then left chartbeat in 2016, to film scroll with crucial Dave and such in Doshi to try and solve the business model problem of journalism. And then one month in six days ago, scroll was acquired by Twitter. And now it
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12:18Speaker 1
amazing. Another story behind your handle. Also, I'm a big top big fan, as well as many folks that that are part of the oh and a community.
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