Twitter sees 52% growth in ad revenue even as global alcohol brands pour out

Twitter revealed that international ad revenue increased 52%, led by strength in the Asia-Pacific region. Ned Segal, Twitter CFO, said in an earnings release that the company total advertising revenue was at US$575 million, an increase of 21% year-on-year (YOY). Meanwhile, owned and operated (O&O) advertising revenue increased by 28% YOY at US$533million.Non-O&O advertising revenue was at US$42 million, a decrease of 28% year-over-year driven by a US$23 million YOY decline from the deprecated TellApart product, which did not have any revenue in Q1. Excluding TellApart, non-O&O advertising revenue would have increased 18%, the statement added.This comes despite recent research from YesMore Agency stating that 42.3% of alcohol brand had not posted at all in the past month, 32.4% had not posted within the past three months and 20.7% had not posted on Twitter in a year or more. This included accounts from brands such as Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Bacardi, Campari, Brown Forman, Beam Suntory and William Grant & Sons.In terms of community engagement, 73.9% did not engage in any form of community management on its Twitter channel. This includes replying to people who engage with them or retweets. The same can be seen in poor engagement levels of posts from 28.8% of brands surveyed.More than 40% of 47 accounts that had not posted in more than a month were rated as having good or excellent engagement levels prior to the halt in posting. A majority of the brands surveyed were highlighted as core brands on its brand owner’s websites, with all accounts having a combination of over 2 million followers. More than 21% of the accounts studied also had more than 20,000 followers.For YesMore Agency, the best performing Twitter accounts are those which have a high frequency of posts (20 times or more per month), a high recency of posts within a month, have good or excellent engagement and use community management to engage their audience. Brands which did well in these factors include Sipsmith, Makers Mark, Bombay Sapphire, Absolut and Jameson.Meanwhile, brands which have been found to “abandon” Twitter include Beefeater, Auchentoshan and Haig Club. The study added that a likely reason for brands to abandon Twitter was likely due to channel overwhelm – which is having too many social media accounts to manage and not having enough resources or budget to continue engaging on all platforms.Last year, 11 global companies in the alcohol and beverage industry have signed an agreement to further commit in developing new robust and responsible marketing standards for digital channels. The brands are Anheuser-Busch InBev, Asahi, Bacardi, Beam Suntory, Brown-Forman, Carlsberg, Diageo, Heineken, Kirin Holdings, Molson Coors and Pernod Ricard.