Skift Take

There is great potential for Twitter to be the go-to-site for consumers, but somehow the brand just ends up making the site more complicated for the mass market.

What happened to the Twitter Travel account?

It may not be a big deal that the account dedicated to keeping travel marketers up-to-date on Twitter has disappeared, but when you take a look at the entire Twitter Roll it looks as if there is no room for travel, not even in its media and entertainment section.

To be fair, Twitter does have travel broken out as a separate category under its case studies, but with half the year done just two campaigns, Louisiana Travel in January 2015 and On The Beach UK in June 2015, posted significant enough results to be included in the humblebrag page.

“I didn’t realize they’d killed the @twittertravel account. I got the feeling that they didn’t do much to cultivate a following on that account. I still have the same dedicated account team that I’m dealing with – business as usual,” Theresa Overby, director of social media strategy at miles for Louisiana Travel told Skift.

Its current ad, search and third-party attribution partner Google/Doubleclick has a much stronger presence for travel marketers on Twitter, @GoogleTravel.

“In order to realize Twitter’s full potential, we must improve in three key areas: ensure more disciplined execution, simplify our service to deliver Twitter’s value faster, and better communicate that value,” said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and interim CEO at Twitter during Tuesday’s earnings call.

No announcement regarding former CEO Dick Costolo’s replacement — who stepped down earlier this month — was made during the call. In addition to that role, Twitter is on the market for a new CMO.

Monthly Active Users (MAUs) rose to 316 million from 308 million in the first quarter 2015. During the call, Twitter’s leaders expressed that engagement is not as high but that they will start setting Daily Active Users as their benchmark for interaction, in addition to other metrics that had some positive results like Direct Messaging, Search and autoplay video.

In the first quarter, Twitter was confident it could make lemonade from its logged out users. During the call, Jack Dorsey expressed his disappointment in the second quarter, “Logged out strategy was not impactful and that’s not acceptable.”

Despite the ad technology and creative acquisitions made in the past year, Twitter’s efforts will be focused more on growing its user-base by further pushing its products’ value proposition while figuring out how to make sure that ad demand will outpace supply.

It will be interesting to see how its new curation product — Project Lightning slated to launch in the fall — will widen its user-base from the early adopters and technologists to the mass market and logged out users.

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Tags: twitter

Photo credit: Twitter's second quarter earnings in 2015 first broadcasted on Periscope. Skift

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