'Twitter is not a social network' says Twitter VP

Think Twitter is a social network? It's not. So says Kevin Thau, VP of business and corporate development at Twitter.
"It's not a social network," he said in a speech at Nokia World this afternoon. "People use Facebook and Twitter - they don't replace each other.
Twitter is not a social network, Twitter is news. It's information."
Thau admitted that Twitter as a social network is a common misconception, though, and claimed that more and more, people are using Twitter purely to "consume interesting content", rather than tweet themselves.
He cited use of the service by political leaders, celebrities and sports stars to prove his point, while saying that Kanye West's recent "I'm sorry Taylor" tweet is already the most retweeted tweet ever.


Thau also highlighted the use of Twitter for breaking news, for example with recent natural disasters in Haiti and Chile.
"It gets broadcast on Twitter first, and amplified on Twitter in a way that's never been seen before," he said.
Thau dished out some stats on Twitter's growth during his speech, too.
60% of its traffic comes from outside the US now, and it now has 145 million registered users, and 210 million people coming to the Twitter.com website every month.
Thau's main focus in his speech was on how Twitter builds its ecosystem in three areas: content, programming and distribution.
Content refers to making it easy for people to tweet, whether from their desktop or mobile. Programming is more about discovery - how people can find tweets and Twitter users to follow.
Finally, distribution is about working with media companies, search engines and more mobile companies to deliver tweets.
How does Twitter partner with Nokia? Thau said it covers several aspects of this ecosystem.
"The work that the Nokia team has been doing to integrate Twitter into the social messaging and different aspects of their phones is really important for us," he said.
"It's easy to put a Twitter app into a handset and call it a day, but it's about being in the browser, in the camera, in the apps and being able to interact in interesting ways."
Thau was asked about plans to make money from Twitter, and replied that its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends are its first foray.
"The engagement rates we see with a Promoted Tweet are 10x what those companies see with a traditional banner ad," he said.
How about mobile specifically? "We're the most successful internet company that started as mobile first," he said.
"We won't have a separate strategy for mobile monetisation to what we do on the website. It's Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends - and those will show up on desktop clients, the web, and mobile clients... We won't treat mobile any differently to how we treat our website. It might monetise better, because you might be checking in more regularly."

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