Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Eagle-eyed Twitter users have noticed that it’s now categorizing itself very differently in the Apple App Store.

In an update yesterday, Twitter now sits in the News category rather than Social Networking. The move shifts it away from its competitors like Facebook, Snapchat and Kik. The switch boosted the app from sixth place in Social Networking to first place within News, according to App Annie.


But why? Twitter didn’t immediately respond for comment, but the change is a quick way to boost its visibility within the App Store’s rankings and bring in new users.

This afternoon, Twitter announced that it had officially, and secretly, filed documents to the S.E.C. in advance of its I.P.O. The company is worth billions upon billions of dollars, and its founders will become extremely rich sometime in the next year. But Twitter, as we experience it, is also set for a radical redesign sometime soon. The company’s finances are set to change; but its looks may be changing just as much.

Twitter has evolved, particularly over the past couple of years, from a simple, text-based service toward something richer and fuller: users can now embed everything from pictures to Vines to full-on mini-apps within their tweets. It’s like a stream gradually becoming a raging river. Twitter has transitioned from a technology company into a powerful media company in its own right.

What’s coming next is a more graphically intense Twitter that is marked by fundamental transformation of its core experience on mobile phones. Within the company, the decision has been to prioritize mobile over any other medium, including the Web, and it will see the most change the most rapidly....

About half of the Twitter users in our sample ever tweeted about news, defined here (and in our recent social media work) as information about events and issues beyond just your friends and family. Users in the sample were more likely to send an original post than a retweet when tweeting in general, but when posting about news, the opposite was true. And while news media accounts made up a relatively small proportion of the accounts a Twitter user in our sample followed, tweets from this type of account made up a significant portion of a user’s feed. Our findings are summarized in the infographic below....

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has 99 problems, and revenue growth ain't one. The company announced income of nearly $243 million for the previous quarter Wednesday, beating analyst estimates by more than $20 million.

It's on track to make a healthy billion dollars and change this year. Its advertising strategy is bearing fruit. If that were all, Twitter investors would be doing a victory lap right now.Instead, they're heading for the exits, driving Twitter shares down a little over 20% in after-market trading. Why? It's not that people are leaving the service; the number of Twitter users grew in the fourth quarter. No, Twitter's own stats reveal the real trouble with a very fundamental kind of user engagement...