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The Year in Twitter: Top Milestones of 2013

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The Year in Twitter: Top Milestones of 2013Twitter-ipo

We learned an awful lot about Twitter in 2013.
With a tell-all book, the company's highly anticipated IPO, and more than 500 million daily tweets from Twitter users, little was left to the imagination.
See also: 25 Twitter Accounts to Make You Laugh
We saw, once again, how quickly Twitter can spread news, both accurate and damaging. We saw the power a tweet can exert when a brand uses it right (Oreo's "Dunk in the Dark" during the Super Bowl), and the anguish it can cause when a brand uses it wrong (we're looking at you, Epicurious).
For all of the content that Twitter brought forth this year, it was the first tell-all book about the company that may have given us the most food for thought when it comes to sending 140-character updates. (More on that below.)
From the laudable to the laughable, here's a look at the tweets, story lines, and business decisions that made 2013 Twitter's biggest year yet.

The Tweets

Top Tweets of 2013

Twitter unveiled the company's annual "Year on Twitter" report Thursday, including what the company calls the Golden Tweets — the year's most retweeted.
Mourners on Twitter are quick to pass along condolences, and the top two tweets had to do with celebrity deaths.
When Glee star Cory Monteith died in July, fellow star Lea Michele's short note and accompanying photo was retweeted 408,266 times at its peak, including retweets in over 130 different countries.
Actor Paul Walker's sudden death in November generated the second most retweeted post of 2013. The confirmation tweet from his staff garnered more than 400,367 retweets.
The third most retweeted tweet from 2013 came on a much, much lighter note. Niall Horan, a member of the pop group One Direction, turned 20 years old, and Twitter helped him celebrate. His birthday declaration received 375,292 retweets.

New Faces

Twitter added more than 30 million users since December 2012, and the new group includes some impressive names. Former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush sent their first tweets in 2013. So did current and future Hall of Fame athletes Joe Montana, Kobe Bryant and Roger Federer.
Twitter even added business mogul and multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, who has more than 720,000 followers despite having sent only four tweets.
However, Twitter still has a famous face or two it hopes to lure in 2014. In a recent Today interview, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo mentioned actresses Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as users he'd love to sign up.

Tweet-Worthy Moments

When the world is abuzz about something, it's a safe bet Twitter is adding fuel to the fire. In no particular order, a few of 2103's most tweetable moments:
The World Welcomes a New Pope. Pope Francis was presented to the world in March, and Twitter was waiting for him. The new Pope's papal inauguration generated more than 130,000 tweets per minute at its peak.
Nelson Mandela's Death. After the former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize winner died earlier this month, millions of mourners took to Twitter to express their sorrow. Twitter reported that Mandela's death generated 7.2 million tweets, including a peak of 95,000 tweets per minute.
The Boston Marathon Bombings. We saw both the best and worst of Twitter during the bombings that took place in April at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Gossip and poorly reported news spread like wildfire over social networks, creating some confusion regarding the identities of the suspected bombers. But Twitter also provided a way for people to spread accurate news, and more importantly, come together in grief and support.
There were more than 27 million tweets sent related to the Boston Marathon Bombings.
The Government Shutdown. When the U.S. government shutdown due to a budget impasse, it lasted 16 days and generated millions of tweets. Twitter also served as a megaphone of sorts for dozens of politicians airing their frustrations to voters.

The New Products

Twitter engineers were busy in 2013, and the company brought about a slew of new features and products for users to enjoy (or tweet angrily about) throughout the year. In August, Twitter added blue and grey lines to user feeds that connect tweets related to the same conversation. Now, if a user responds to a tweet hours later, both the original and the response are grouped together and linked with a conversation line.
Not everyone loves the new feature, and the prospect of organizing conversations will be a challenge Twitter continues to face in 2014. The platform has always suffered from an organization problem. With so many tweets being sent each minute, it's inevitable content gets pushed further down the Twitter feed, making it difficult for users to quickly search and locate tweets that may be days or even hours old.
The most noticeable, and possibly profitable, change came late in 2013 when Twitter started previewing tweet images so users would see them in their feeds without needing to click on the actual tweet. The update has made for a more colorful, lively Twitter stream, but also means images from corporate or brand accounts (i.e., ads) are now right in front of users.
Nick Bilton, a journalist with The New York Times whose recent book Hatching Twitter gave readers an in-depth glimpse into the company's early days, may have summed up the image preview feature best:
Twitter also came out with some relatively useful features in 2013, none more universally necessary than the platform's new emergency alert feature, which rolled out in September. Users can opt to receive push notifications or text messages in times of crisis. If a user opts in to receive alerts from the American Red Cross, for example, he will receive messages when the Red Cross deems it necessary to send a warning or an alert to users.
The company spent the year tinkering with other, less dire types of alerts and notifications. Twitter started pushing out recommendation notifications in September, alerting users if a number of accounts in their network begin to follow someone new, or retweet or favorite the same tweet.
Some users had already been getting these notifications by following a Twitter experiment account, @MagicRecs.
The account sent notifications in the form of direct messages, but only to its followers. After people responded positively to them, and more people began following it to receive the alerts, Twitter brought the feature to all users. Twitter used a number of experimental accounts in 2013, some more successful than others.

The Business

$TWTR

Twitter's IPO dominated business and tech headlines for much of October and early November. It took advantage of new rules outlined by The JOBS Act, allowing companies with revenue less than $1 billion to file important legal documents with the SEC in secrecy, ahead of an IPO.
That meant once Twitter did announce an IPO was coming — which it did using its own service — things moved quickly. Twitter provides users a near endless stream of content on all manner of topics, but the most important tweet of the year, at least from a business perspective, may have come from Twitter itself:
The major takeaways from Twitter's pre-IPO S-1 document: Twitter has 218 million monthly active users; the company generates nearly all (87%) of its revenue from advertising; and Twitter is not turning a profit.
Despite general concern that Twitter was still in the red, investors were quick to back the company come Nov. 7. The stock opened at more than $45 per share — well above the $26 IPO price set by Twitter — and has continued to climb ahead of the holidays. As of Wednesday, the stock was hovering above $52 per share.
At an early glance, the IPO was a major success. Many Twitter execs and cofounders are now worth millions, and even billions of dollars, and the company has bragging rights over competitor Facebook, whose IPO was a relative flop back in 2012, after the stock price dropped more than 50% just months after hitting the markets.
The next big test for Twitter? Showing some growth in the company's next earnings report. That means higher user metrics (look for international growth), and another solid step toward profitability.

First Female Board Member

Twitter came under fire from the media when it became clear the company was moving forward with its IPO despite lacking a single female board member or investor. This isn't uncommon in the tech community, unfortunately. Well-known business leaders from both genders, most notably Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, have been outspoken about the need for more female executives within the tech community. Twitter was not alone in that respect; it simply had everybody's attention.
In December, Twitter finally brought on Marjorie Scardino, the former CEO of Pearson, as its first female board member. Scardino spent nearly 16 years as CEO of the publishing company, and also founded and published the Georgia Gazette newspaper. Both experiences should be beneficial as Twitter works to align itself as a partner with major news and entertainment publishers in the years to come.
A drawback: Scardino reportedly set up her Twitter account in October, and tweeted for the very first (and only) time on the day she was announced to the board. Her use of the service will undoubtedly increase as she plays a role in steering the company.

Twitter Partnerships

Twitter inked a handful of new partnership deals in 2013, none more glamorous than the agreement made between it and the world's most lucrative sports league, the NFL.
Twitter announced its new ad partnership program, Twitter Amplify, in May, and the NFL is one of many media organizations to agree to push out exclusive video clips and near instant replays over the platform. Partners can pay to run short videos, preceded by a short video ad, to user Twitter streams in an attempt to bridge the gap between social media use and live television watching.
Anamitra Banerji, a former Twitter product manager who built out the company's first ad products as employee #30, now works as partner at venture capital firm Foundation Capital. He believes Twitter's push toward TV partnerships is spot on.
"People know that as you are watching TV, you have a bunch of other screens around you — your laptop, your phone, and your tablet," he says. "There was this emerging space called second screen, which was ‘let’s grab [user] attention and turn that into a business.' Turns out that there is a second screen — it’s Twitter. The second screen is Twitter."
In addition to the NFL, Twitter added other high-profile Amplify partners like CBS, A&E and FOX. In October, Twitter teamed with Nielsen to come out with Twitter TV Ratings, a report that quantifies the social media conversations around popular TV shows.

Hatching Twitter

Twitter has already had three CEOs in the company's short, seven-year history. It wasn't entirely clear, however, how dysfunctional and combative the founding team was until the release of Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton of the New York Times.
Bilton's book tells the story of Twitter's earliest days, a frustrating time for the company's cofounders and investors. The book is not gentle. It describes in detail the backstabbing and inner workings of a company that saw multiple cofounders (or major early contributors) tossed to the curb. Cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey took particular heat after an unflattering excerpt from the book ran in New York Times Magazine in October.
The book has gone on to become a New York Times bestseller, and explains a lot about how the service evolved from an "all about me" mindset to the news sharing platform it's become today.
With increasing pressure to please Wall Street and the potential for big ad revenues looming in 2014, it will be important for Twitter to remember what got it here: a simple user experience.
So, what will the first year of a public Twitter look like? We're about to find out.
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