Given that the President-elect of the United States uses the service daily, along with most celebrities, not to mention that every news outlet and consumer-facing brand sees it as a required tool, it is somewhat shocking that Twitter struggles so greatly to grow its user base.
One year after co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to run the company, it reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth since going public in 2013. In that second quarter, it grew its user base by just 1%. In the third-quarter, reported in October, it beat earnings expectations and it grew its user base by 3% year over year, but it also lost money, laid off 9% of its workforce, and announced it would abruptly shutter 6-second video service Vine.
To make matters worse, the company experienced an exodus of top executives in 2016. COO Adam Bain, CTO Adam Messinger, product head Kevin Weil, and product VP Jeff McFarland are among those who left this year, for varying stated reasons.
Twitter is failing to grow, and failing to make money. Its numbers continually disappoint Wall Street. But the first priority, from which everything else will follow, must be getting new users. Twitter has a mere 317 million users. For comparison, Facebook has 1.8 billion.
So: How can Twitter grow?
Tell its story better
When I ask friends who don’t use Twitter why they don’t use it, they typically say they already have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the last thing they need is one more time-waster. A few have even said, “I don’t need to know what everyone had for lunch.”
Of course, that’s not what Twitter is for. And the content in your timeline depends on whom you follow. If you use it to follow news outlets, you’re not going to see what people had for lunch. The service is what you make of it—you build the experience by following the right mix of people or organizations. But Twitter has failed to tell that story publicly. The average person that does not work in media, tech, or finance may not care about Twitter because they haven’t been told why they should care.
Twitter claims that it has 90% brand awareness globally. That is: 90% of people in the world recognize the blue bird and know what Twitter is. But do they know what it’s useful for? As AdWeek writes, “It would seem Twitter has more of a product problem than a brand problem.”
Perhaps a little bit of marketing would help. And Twitter knows it, so in July it rolled out a new “See what’s happening” ad campaign to showcase the value of Twitter. One of the first two spots is entirely about politics, while the other is broad and asks, “What’s everyone talking about? What’s trending? How did it start?”
See what's happening: https://t.co/ChbWRrSJyKhttps://t.co/r9AZd9rzI3
— Twitter (@twitter) July 25, 2016
But these spots still don’t answer the question of why a non-user would want to become a user. There’s a lot happening on Twitter—more than can be conveyed with an image of Hillary Clinton putting her arms up, or of Barack Obama dropping a mic. Part of that difficulty is because Twitter is doing so much—it’s streaming debates, streaming NFL, sharing news digests in its “Moments” tab, marking some users as “verified,” recommending users to follow.
Streamlining its proposition to users that haven’t tried it may require Twitter to streamline its own strategy.
Fix its abuse problem
No one wants to join a new network if they’re going to get abused there. And during the election, the Anti-Defamation League found “a significant uptick in anti-Semitic tweets from January 2016 to July 2016.” It found that the hateful tweets were “disproportionately likely” to come from supporters of Donald Trump, who used Twitter (and Facebook) extremely effectively as a campaign tool.
But the abuse on Twitter isn’t just anti-Semitic, and it wasn’t just from the election. The actress Leslie Jones was repeatedly targeted with abusive tweets from an editor at the news site Breitbart; the supermodel Chrissy Teigen changed her Twitter account to private (users must request to follow, and be approved) because she is “not strong enough anymore” to deal with the volume of abuse from trolls.
Clearly, trolls on Twitter are a major problem—arguably Twitter’s biggest problem right now. It is certainly a major obstacle to growth, and the issue may have been the central obstacle to a sale effort, too. When a reported effort to sell the company this fall collapsed (rumored interested buyers: Google, Salesforce, Disney, and others), Jim Cramer of CNBC alleged that the reason Salesforce walked away was that CEO Marc Benioff was concerned about Twitter trolls.
I have no answer to Twitter (allegedly!) losing multiple buyouts due to harassment issues and responding by killing a creative haven for POC
— Matt Drance (@drance) October 28, 2016
Of course, Twitter is in a tight spot with cracking down on trolls. It cannot be seen as impinging on free speech. In the past, it has been criticized for banning accounts. In January, it revoked the verified badge of Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart blogger; in July it banned him completely; two days later it restored his account.
When pressed on this important issue, the company has prevaricated, using a form of the same default statement every time. “People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter,” the company said in a statement to press in July. “But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”
Perhaps a point system is a potential fix, where users who get reported for abuse receive penalty points, and get temporarily suspended only when they reach a certain total.
Whatever Twitter tries, it must try something, and stop waffling. It must reduce the volume of abuse on its platform, or it will not only have trouble attracting new users, it will risk losing the users it has.
Focus the streaming strategy
This year, Twitter jumped into the business of streaming live content more than ever before.
It streamed all of the presidential debates, and they got high viewership and generated good buzz. (The second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was the most tweeted debate ever and the most tweeted day of the 2016 election cycle, with 75 million tweets sent; he New York Times called Election Day “another Twitter moment.”)
It also reportedly paid the NFL $10 million to $15 million for the rights to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games. Those streams, too, have garnered strong viewership. And Twitter had great success selling ads against the games: the Wall Street Journal reported that big consumer-facing brands like Bank of America bought packages worth between $1 million and $8 million each for the 10 games, or about $1 million per game.
But what is the end goal of Twitter’s forays into live streaming? Is it to get air time to sell to advertisers? That would help grow ad revenue, but not necessarily users. Is it to attract new users, who may not be able to see this same content elsewhere? If that’s the case, why doesn’t Twitter advertise its football streams outside of Twitter?
Because of its happening-right-now nature, Twitter is already the best place to go for live chatter about a sports event. Couple that with the NFL streaming, and you start to see that sports is something Twitter has interest in. But how important is it to Twitter’s strategy? Does Twitter want to become a sports-streaming network? Or a broad streaming network for all live events? Right now it’s neither—it’s a place for live chatter and news, plus, occasionally, live streaming. (Facebook is dealing with similar questions.) If Twitter is to grow, it can’t continue to have its hands in everything, but should pick and choose its strengths and build a reputation around the best experience it can offer.
Highlight news value
For me, as a journalist, I say the best experience Twitter has to offer is news value. It is a tool for people who want to stay informed and know about news the second it breaks. I use it to follow reporters and news outlets, not brands and celebrities.
Of course, people can use Twitter however they’d like, but news gathering is one major part that Twitter could be stressing more to potential new users. It began doing that last year with its new feature Moments, a tab (symbolized by the lightning bolt) that summarizes news stories through a slideshow of popular tweets.
But Moments isn’t the best way Twitter could showcase its news value. The feature simply isn’t very good. Many of the “moments” are for celebrity deaths, and are comprised of tweets from celebrities. Moments feels like a tweet-version of Us Weekly. Twitter should brainstorm a better way for it to highlight the most popular news tweets. One year ago, it began doing that with “While you were away,” an algorithm that pushes the most popular tweets (from accounts you follow) to the top of your feed when you open Twitter. But those tweets aren’t only news; they are whichever tweets were popular. Twitter could do more to offer users the ability to see top tweets based on their news topic preferences.
Listen to the power users
In the same spirit, many of Twitter’s “power users” have great ideas about how the service could be improved. They often request certain tweaks that just don’t come. They tend to be granular details, but they matter to the people who use Twitter most zealously.
To name just a few features that power users have requested: the ability to easily filter out all tweets containing a certain word, or on a certain topic (in order to avoid spoilers about a popular TV show or movie); an easier way to write “tweetstorms” of multiple tweets (users currently have to manually reply to their own tweet each time, which is laborious); integration of Instagram photos and videos so that they play nicely and show up in tweets (Vine videos and GIFs do); and the ability to pre-schedule tweets (currently only available for brands or businesses, and for individuals only on TweetDeck), among other requests.
Balancing the wishes of its most devoted users with simplifying the product in order to attract new users isn’t easy, by any means. But Twitter must do it if it wants to grow. Twitter needs to refine its identity, decide what it wants to be, and then tell that story to the public.
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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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