Twitter’s #yearinreview sees the social network present its most popular trending topics and hastags of the year; they have also released details of some of the more famous twitterers that opened their accounts this year.
The #yearinreview reveals some interesting trends for 2011 such as the popularity of Wayne Rooney and Charlie Sheen to the massive interest in iPads and iPhones, Mozilla Firefox and even the humble Guinness. In 2011 new members included Simon Cowell in November, Cheryl Cole in August and even the Pope in June.
More importantly the #yearinreview reveals the increasing role Twitter plays in world politics and global events. On top of the world news trends were the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound, Mubarak’s resignation and also the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami. Unsurprisingly, countries and cities in the top ten of the list included Cairo and Egypt, Libya and also Japan.
As well as being a popularity barometer for global events Twitter has also made significant steps in improving its business model in 2011. The growth of promoted tweets has been substantial and whilst there were only 600 hundred advertisers using the beta ad system back in June, it has now attracted around 2,400 in the 6 months since.
More recently, the social network rolled out a “self-serve” ad system that allows users to set up their campaigns and pay for ads with credit cards, clearly marketed towards small and medium sized businesses that are already using Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.
2011 has certainly been an interesting year for Twitter and clearly the plans to roll out promoted tweets and self-serve ads will see an increasingly monetised Twitter by this time next year.
