At one of the IAB Now conferences being held in Argentina, sports journalist Juan Pablo Varsky (photo) said that "Twitter is the gateway to a park," a park where you can find both people and brands, either directly "through your own space" or through online advertising.
In this regard, he stressed that Twitter not only allows you to connect directly with people, but also makes it easier to find people and businesses, summing up the idea with the slogan "people looking for people."
Regarding online brand presence, Varsky launched @VarskySports on Twitter this past September and already has over 260,000 followers. Varsky monetizes this sports channel through sponsored tweets. During his presentation at the IAB, he said he has a very clear policy regarding the differentiation of sponsored content and non-sponsored content. "We take that risk (…) we prefer to clearly label which content is company-sponsored and which content is not sponsored" and pointed out that the risk taking also extends to producing quality content for the channel.
The growth of social networks in the region is no surprise. According to comScore, 114.5 million people in Latin America visited a social networking site in June of this year, which is equivalent to 96% of the region’s total online population. This represents a 16% increase in comparison to the previous year. Specifically, Twitter has 114.4 million users in the region–a 56% increase in the last year. In Argentina, the number of Twitterers is 2.3 million.
These figures are giving rise to a debate on the role of social networks in the current digital world and the new role of journalism in these platforms. Regarding the latter, Varsky said that Twitter is not a journalistic media in itself, but rather a medium that offers news items and news tools. In his opinion, journalism’s new configuration on social networks must be shaped by combining the values ??of traditional media and the use of technological innovations. "We must put aside the contradiction of old media, new media," he said.
