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Essentially, when you log into your account on your full-size computer, Twitter will analyze the cookies in your browser to see where you’ve been on the non-mobile web. Then, when you log in to that same account on mobile, it can still use your web cookies to hit you with retargeted ads.

mobile phones don’t have the ability to set cookies so you can’t do retargeting.

Facebook only recently began allowing retargeted ads on mobile, and only through a “custom audiences” targeting program separate from FBX.

Lucky for Twitter, most of what people do on it is public, so it doesn’t spark the same privacy concerns as Facebook. Twitter also offers an opt-out of retargeting under Promoted Content on its Security And Privacy settings page. Plus it honors Do Not Track for users that enable it in their browsers.

It’s also recently opened up keyword targeting so advertisers can reach people who’ve tweeted certain words. Between keyword targeting and cookie retargeting, Twitter is breaking out of the demand generation and into the lucrative demand fulfillment part of the advertising funnel where Google’s search ad business lives. Advertisers are willing to pay top dollar if you can deliver them someone ready to buy their product. And there’s no better sign of someone’s intent to buy than having recently visited a site and almost made the purchase already. Cookies could be very tasty for Twitter.

unenfeld said that some of them are still working to understand “the conversational aspect,” both on Twitter and in general, but he noted that Twitter also works well as a broadcast medium for other types of content, like a promotional video. A campaign on Twitter, he said, is “the ultimate complement to a TV buy.”

This is one of Twitter's greatest strengths and weaknesses: It's primarily useful as a news broadcast and consumption site. While Twitter has been trying to make its service friendlier by elevating direct messages to first-class status, among other things, it's still primarily a news aggregation service, even if it's not necessarily "friendly."

That's fine if you, like I, use Twitter as a work tool. Sure, I'm friends with some of the people I interact with on Twitter, but Twitter doesn't seem to be the ideal place for friends to congregate online.

In short, neither Facebook nor Twitter has yet delivered a truly exceptional experience in the areas for which people love them. They should focus on being themselves before they bother cross-dressing as the other.

That’s four percentage points up from last year’s 67%

when it comes to frequency of use, the rankings change. Facebook continues to remain at the top in the daily rankings, with 63% of people accessing it on a daily basis. Instagram — last in the general rankings — is not far off and in second place, with a 57% daily use. Similarly, its weekly and “less often” rates are also close, respectively at 22%/20% and 14%/22%. (

Twitter may overall be seeing less usage in general than Pinterest but those who are on it appear more engaged: some 46% of Twitter users are on it daily for their quick fix of quips made and received. Pinterest, in contrast, has a fairly low rate of daily usage, with 23% of its users visiting on a daily basis. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also are generating a significant amount of mulitple-times-per-day use, with 40% at Facebook, 35% at Instagram and 29% at Twitter, Pew says. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has a lot of work to do, with only 13% of its users going there daily.

Pew notes that for now it looks like Facebook is partly winning because of how it has managed to appeal to a wide range of users — a pretty impressive turn for widening its reach, considering that it started out as a network restricted only to university networks. The demographic data for other networks stands in contrast to this: Pinterest “holds particular appeal to female users”, with women four times more likely as men to be Pinterest users; LinkedIn is “especially” popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram resonate with urbanites and younger adults, and non-whites. (Facebook has over 70% usage among whites, Hispanics and black users, Pew notes.) All of them, excepting LinkedIn, has its highest proportion of users in the 18-29 age bracket; LinkedIn is more popular with the 30-49 group. Among those who say they use only one social networking site, Facebook is a clear winner with 84% selecting it as their sole site, with the others lagging behind by a very far stretch: 8% solely use LinkedIn, 4% solely use Pinterest, and Instagram and Twitter each picked up only 2%

 When it comes to picking a winner, you’ll want to see all the contestants. If the updates include @username mention to you, you’ll be able to see all the updates in your Mentions timeline (see here for more information on replies and mentions). Just doing a public search may not show every single update, and some contestants may be filtered from search for quality.

You might decide to have users include relevant hashtag topics along with the updates (like #contest or #yourcompanyname)

280 Slides:

LovelyCharts:

For my money, algorithms like the ones behind Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest do a much better job of making music suggestions than this app does. Twitter Hype Machine. 

Favorites increased quite a lot. Along with Retweets in the graph below, this shows a lot more engagement with the Tweets themselves. Clicks, on the other hand, show engagement with the original content. This could explain why clicks didn’t increase as much--if Twitter is hoping to increase engagement on average with Tweets within your stream, it appears it’s working from our early indications.

t can be easy to get carried away with something that shows so much promise like this, but don’t forget that your followers probably want to see some variety from your Tweets. As you can see from our analytics near the top of this post, we’re still seeing some great engagement on Tweets that include a link without an image. In fact--that screenshot shows that link-based Tweets without images can get even more click-throughs that those with images.

93% of teens say they’re using social networks, down a percentage point from the previous survey.

According to data from Experian Hitwise, Facebook’s leading share of US visits to social networking sites and forums has dropped from 63.2% in March 2012 to 58.5% in March 2013.

Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends.

weekdays provide 14% more engagement than weekends, so this is definitely one you’ll want to test on your audience.

retweets have been shown to be highest around 5pm.

For click-throughs, the best times seem to be around noon and 6pm.

Twitter did an interesting study of these users and found that they are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute.

They’re also 119% more likely to use Twitter during school or work hours.

10pm–6am: This is the dead zone, when hardly any emails get opened. 6am–10am: Consumer-based marketing emails are best sent early in the morning. 10am-noon: Most people are working, and probably won’t open your email. Noon–2pm: News and magazine updates are popular during lunch breaks. 2–3pm: After lunch lots of people buckle down and ignore their inbox. 3–5pm: Property and financial-related offers are best sent in the early afternoon. 5–7pm: Holiday promotions & B2B promotions get opened mostly in the early evening. 7–10pm: Consumer promotions are popular again after dinner.

 23.63% of emails are opened within an hour of being received, this is something we definitely want to get right.

For more general emails, open rates, click-through rates and abuse reports were all found to be highest during early mornings and on weekends.

In a different study by MailChimp open rates were shown to be noticeably lower on weekends.

open rates increased after 12pm, and were highest between 2pm and 5pm.

A GetResponse study backed this up by showing that open rates drop off slightly, and click-through rates drop significantly on weekends. GetResponse found that Thursday is the best day for both open rates and click-throughs.

70% of users say they read blogs in the morning More men read blogs at night than women Mondays are the highest traffic days for an average blog 11am is usually the highest traffic hour for an average blog Comments are usually highest on Saturdays and around 9am on most days Blogs that post more than once per day have a higher chance of inbound links and more unique views

As far as best practices, the group found that 76% of content that was shared had a photo attached, and 18% had a video as part of the message. As a whole, tweets sent between 2 and 5pm PST generated the most response.