It’s safe to say, probably everyone who reads this blog post uses twitter. The question surrounding the company is, how does twitter make its money? Having grown exponentially in the past couple of years, revenue has rose “from just $28m in 2010 to $317m by the end of 2012.” and is forecasted to increase by more than 100% by the end of this year.
“On Thursday, Twitter announced that it wanted to raise $1bn (£619m) by listing on the US stock markets” This is the biggest initial public offering (IPO) since Facebook in 2012. One issue that surrounded Facebook, that Twitter has successfully overcome, was integration of advertising. Twitters approach at “native” advertising subtly places small advertisements related to trending topics in the timeline of its users. Companies can pay to ‘promote’ tweets and push information about themselves into the feeds of the public.
Twitter also uses ‘Firehose’. A tactic to gain money by selling their data to the public (around 500 million tweets a day) that companies can look into and find out what the public is talking about. By doing so, the advertisements that are later ‘promoted’ are suited to the trending topics recently tweeted. This contrasts the seemingly scattered approach from Facebook that landed users with advertisements that seemed random and/or out of context.
Successful advertising and listing on the US stock markets are twitters “Cashtag” to profits.

Mastering the art of marketing and advertising…
On the 1st of October each year the Chinese celebrate the founding of the peoples republic with a national holiday which has proven to be an appealing target for marketing & advertising. The holiday “Drives up to $127.4 billion” according to Chinese broadcaster CCTV. As the holiday has increased in popularity, its wake can be felt internationally, especially in fashion capitals such as London and Paris. “Many affluent Chinese choose to spend Golden Week abroad, something that did not take long to come to the attention of luxury retailers in Paris and London.”
The holiday has proven to be so lucrative that London based company Harrods now coordinates special events to attract Chinese tourists and holiday makers. Even companies such as Burberry provide pop up stores to cater to the holiday event.

However, “in order to tap the opportunity efficiently, it’s vital that European retailers advertise to tourists in China before they select a destination and set off.” To derive the most profit from the influx of Chinese shoppers companies must make their products available to the Chinese public. Companies have developed apps in mandarin and hired mandarin speaking employees for the occasion. The marketing and advertising potential is limitless, any business with a clear incentive to grow will make great use of the Chinese ‘Golden Week’.

Read more into the topic by clicking the hyperlink above or here: http://www.businessoffashion.com/2013/10/forget-fashion-week-its-golden-week.html

 Roughly three years ago, instagram exploded onto the screens of cell phones around the world. Since then the company has seen its popularity sky rocket, but, as a growing business it has some keeping up to do. Faced by competitors such as Vine and Keek, the company needs to work hard to stay a leading competitor in the mobile app market. Instagram was “bought by Facebook for $1bn (£619m), but has never made a profit.”

We have all heard of Twitter, and most of us will have heard of a company called Vine, which was introduced on Twitter blogs earlier this year in January. Vine was a front runner in the app market offering 6 second looping videos to users as a new way to interact with others using social media and apps similar to Instagram. Instagram was able to bounce back from the threat and introduced its own looping video service to its users. However, they are still stuck in limbo. 

Instagram is a “growing business” and its new approach to sustainability is the introduction of ads. The topic has proven controversial in the past, especially with Facebook, so the question stands. How will the introduction of ads to instagram be taken, and will this benefit the company? Only time will tell…