Preparing for Twitter’s mobile moves

Monday, 04 January 2010 10:00

Ronald Cornelisse, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Tekelec, has nearly 20 years of telecoms experience. Here, he foresees the unprecedented growth of Twitter as a blueprint for the messaging services of the future.

 Last month Twitter signed a deal with Indian mobile operator Bharti Airtel, enabling subscribers to send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. This Bharti deal revealed Twitter’s ambition to drive usage over the mobile platform and its desire to expand into the emerging markets, which are experiencing a dramatic increase in the demand for mobile services.

At the time of the deal, Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, posted comments on Twitter’s corporate blog stating, “There are over one billion people with Internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS (Short Messaging Service).” He added, “In many parts of the world people do not have Internet access but they can text – and that means they can access Twitter.”

Twitter followed its entry into India by announcing its availability in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populated nation, a few weeks later.

As the popularity of Twitter grows in developing economies, so too will SMS as a tool for sending and receiving updates. According to Crowd Science, which collects data on the demographics and attitudes of website visitors, 19% of Twitter users accessed the service through SMS in August 2009. However, in regions where mobile usage dwarfs Internet usage, this percentage is substantially higher.

The increase in SMS activity is poised to cause both a problem and an opportunity for mobile operators. The proliferation of Twitter users can create unpredictable and unprecedented traffic spikes using outdated network equipment. The opportunity lies in harnessing the power of Twitter followers for innovative SMS advertising.

Tweets and network traffic peaks

Multi-million SMS message spikes that take place during a national or religious holiday, or whenever breaking news appears, can overload existing SMS infrastructures. For one thing, people already send higher numbers of one-to-one text message updates during these times. China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, for example, estimated that China's mobile phone users might send more than 18 billion text messages around the lunar New Year holidays.

In addition, operators also have to contend with Twitter SMS traffic volumes generated by other sources such as a news organisation’s Twitter page, and Twitter users who re-tweet (that is, copy and forward) another user’s message, multiplying the strain on the network. The cumulative results can be network bottlenecks, crippled SMS service, damaged customer relationships and expensive upgrades.

This concern will likely expand globally. According to a recent article in the Daily Telegraph, Twitter is planning to continue its expansion across the mobile platform. The British-based newspaper reported that Twitter “is in talks with mobile phone carriers all over the world to allow people to post and receive tweets via text message, without the need for web access.” Twitter has recently developed a new SMS re-tweet feature, providing subscribers with the opportunity to easily re-post another user’s most recent tweet with a text message.The reason for the overload is the original SMS infrastructure developed in the early 1990s. When these systems were deployed, service providers delivered a limited number of person-to-person (P2P) messages, and the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) could adequately handle the traffic. This legacy approach is still employed by most operators, and supports an antiquated “store-and-forward” delivery model ill-suited for today’s messaging needs and operational costs.

To deal with today’s growing demand for SMS-based services, mobile operators can deploy a modular, next-generation SMS Network which breaks down the SMSC into separate functionalities. This enables operators to add capacity only where needed, adding flexibility and reducing costs to handle message volume spikes. Messages are sent using First Delivery Attempt (FDA) mechanisms, which succeed 85%–95% of the time, requiring far less storage, and overhead and maintenance than the old-fashioned SMSC approach.

Making money via Twitter texts

In-message SMS advertising appended to social network SMS messages maximises operators’ profit and strengthens their subscriber relationships. This idea is to insert customised sponsored content into the unused portion of text messages, delivering advertisements directly to the handset. The dimensions of a single Tweet provide advertisers with sufficient space to do this. According to the user guide and analysis tool TwitterFriends, the typical tweet is 82.1 characters long. So even if a Twitter user name takes up the maximum 20 characters, that leaves at least 58 characters remaining.

The opportunities are extensive. For example, a celebrity with more than one million followers, such as Brazilian football coach Mano Menezes or Jordan’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah, can generate more than 190,000 SMS tweet updates with one post (based on the 19% access figure from Crowd Science) all of which can include a relevant advertisement. Prolific celebrity Twitter users or brands can generate tens of millions of SMS tweets each week or month. The ads can also be in several languages, as Twitter recently added French and Spanish to reach nearly 50 more countries – many in developing markets.

Twitter and other social networks also add new elements of reach and relevance that one-to-one in-message advertisements can never achieve. Operators can piggyback on highly-followed celebrities by selling advertisements of relevant products and services, knowing that subscribers are already interested in the brand or celebrity.

At a technical level, operators can position the advertisement below the tweet text, with a separator character between the two. If there is insufficient room for both the message and the advertisement, operators can create an additional message segment (not charged to subscribers) or send a Flash SMS, where the subscriber sees the advertisement immediately on the screen and must click it to view the SMS tweet.

Conclusion

Twitter and other social networks have rapidly ushered in a new era for the SMS. Twitter CEO Evan Williams said the mobile platform is a key focus area due to its reach and revenue potential, stating, “Mobile is bigger than people think.”

Twitter, advertisers and operators are all looking to take advantage of the pervasiveness, immediacy and relevance of SMS messages and the personal connections derived from social networking. The solution to both challenges lies at the heart of a mobile operator’s architecture. Changes can be made at the SMS network core that will enable operators to capitalise on the unprecedented growth of Twitter and evolve the SMS network for next-generation messaging needs.

More info:

• www.tekelec.com 

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