“The world’s a big place, and Twitter plays some role, some small role, in making it smaller,” said Richard Alfonsi, VP of Global Online Sales at Twitter during his presentation on the final day of eTail West 2013. Twitter brings people closer to what’s happening in the world – to friends, to businesses, to celebrities. All of that, of course, creates very interesting, juicy marketing opportunities.

In the below presentation, Alfonsi gives some hilarious and poignant examples of how Twitter does that and how it can make for marketing gold for brands and retailers everywhere. For instance, NBA star Kevin Durant, turned to Twitter during the NBA lockout, asking whether anyone was in the mood to play some flag football in Oklahoma City…he was bored. He got responses, naturally, but what happened next was something no one would have thought possible: he ended up playing an impromptu game of football and filming it.

As you watch the presentation, you’ll learn some interesting facts about Twitter, like the fact that Twitter has 200 million monthly active users. As for the volume of tweets, it took Twitter three years to get to a billion tweets – now a billion Tweets happen every two and a half days. That. Is. Crazy.

He explains that Twitter is mobile because it was born mobile. The whole 140 characters thing? That was because of the mobile nature of SMS messaging – which Twitter was designed to utilize.

After laying all this out, Alfonsi gets into the good stuff: how Twitter plays into retail and marketing. In case that’s really all you care about, fast-forward to the 8:00 minute mark and you’ll hear it from there.

There’s lots of interesting stuff in here so go ahead and watch it if you weren’t lucky enough to be there!

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