Twitter is currently enjoying a popularity surge within the publishing industry. According to many, Twitter has delivered more video views that usual over the last two months, for some compensating for the reach lost on Facebook since it made changes to its news feed.

Bauer has found that Twitter video views increased fivefold from October to December 2017. CNBC International has had “notable growth” on its video views in February, an in the same month Stylist saw a 500% increase in its video views as a result of dedicating more resources to Twitter. Men’s interest site Joe Media saw a 20% increase over four months to a total of 6.2 million.

Much of this will have been caused by Twitter's recent feature updates such as push notifications, all designed to improve the relevance of content that users are exposed to and therefore increase discoverability for publishers. Buoyed by higher views, the number of publishers and the amount they post has naturally increased.

“We’ve seen a big resurgence in Twitter,” said Niall McGarry, founder of Joe Media, adding that the growth in views “is significant.” So significant in fact that Joe Media has doubled its content team and increased the amount of content it puts on Twitter. Twitter excelled in engagement over Facebook with a post by Joe Media featuring former footballer Neville Southall gained 7,000 retweets, 12,000 likes and almost a million views, whilst only gaining 1,000 shares on Facebook.

“Whether content does well on Facebook is in the lap of the gods. The algorithm is much more complex,” said McGarry. “Twitter has a consistency that Facebook doesn’t.”

Publishers looking for new forms of exposure is not surprising considering the recent changes made by Facebook, and as one of the biggest names in social media Twitter is an obvious platform choice and other platforms like LinkedIn and Snapchat are jumping on the bandwagon. Publishers say Twitter’s U.K. team, particularly Lee LeBorgne, Amplify partnerships lead, and Julia White, head of entertainment and lifestyle content partnerships, are making advances to work more collaboratively and thus allow publishers to capitalise, and quickly build, on the popularity of videos while they are trending. “We have an open dialogue on almost a daily basis,” said Greg Adams, head of video at Bauer Xcel Media. “That makes it easy to quickly adapt strategy and key learnings.”

For example, within 24 hours of Grazia posting a video on Twitter with facts about Meghan Markle, shortly after the announcement of the Royal engagement, the Twitter team flagged Bauer that the video was performing better than expected. This spurred the publisher to create additional content for the platform.

Written by Lucinda Southern, 28 February 2018, published on digiday.com. Read the full article here