By Spencer Feingold
Twitter is strengthening its partnerships with video creators in an effort to bring new and engaging content to the sharing platform, a company executive told Cheddar on Monday.
“The success mechanism is actually being a partner to our content producers and their business models,” said Kay Madati, Twitter’s ($TWTR) global vice president of content partnerships.
The company now collaborates with over 950 global partners to create video content and live streaming shows, such as "Power Star Live," a 30-minute show produced by Will Packer that covers the latest from the social community known as Black Twitter.
“It is certainly not accidental that we have positioned ourselves that way,” Madati said, adding that unlike other social media companies that take a more hands-off approach to content on its platform, Twitter is directly involved with content creation. “We are very different than some of our competitors in the space,” he said.
In recent years, Twitter has made a concerted effort to expand video sharing. The platform encourages users to upload original content, stream live video with the in-app extension Periscope, and create GIFs.
The company found that in the last year, video views have increased by a factor of 220. Also, tweets with video are six times more likely to be retweeted than tweets with photos.
Madati said Twitter will pursue new partnerships as video continues to grow, but the company is less concerned about the volume of partners and more interested in going “deeper and wider” with its creators.
It is really about what “we are doing with those partners that showcase how robust and creative you can be on Twitter in and around video content,” he said.
The company hopes to marry conversations on the platform with video content, as it did with “Power Star Live,” which brought hot topics being discussed on Black Twitter to a video format.
“When those two things come together, that is our superpower and where the magic really happens,” Madati said.
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