Is 2016 the Year of a New Twitter?
Twitter is, needless to say, undergoing a lot of changes. It faces significant pressure from investors, and CEO Jack Dorsey recently announced the decision for several executive leaders to leave the company.
Twitter is at a key point in its evolution. It’s proven that it can get a significant number of people to buy into its promise and spend time on the platform, but investors want to see more. Twitter’s current user base isn’t enough to satisfy them as they compare it (fairly or unfairly) to Facebook’s massive user growth. The one thing that will satisfy investors is user growth, but the pursuit for users is fraught with risks.
Balancing Two Audiences
Twitter’s tried several tactics to get users on its platform. It’s launched Moments, and it recently kicked off an advertising campaign. Those are a start to solving Twitter’s user growth problems (and the results of which we’ll see on an upcoming investors call), but it’s still unclear whether or not Twitter, as it stands today, is capable of attracting enough new users to satisfy investors. The only other option is a fundamental shift in what Twitter is, how it works and what it offers.
Changing how it operates could be just what Twitter needs to excite the masses and get the general population onboard with the platform, but the interests of the general population don’t always coincide with the expectations of the current user base.
Take the announcement that Twitter may extend the allowable character count on Twitter beyond 140 characters. Current users didn’t embrace the news and some even threatened to leave the service if it were implemented. Twitter’s users feel a sense of ownership over the platform. That has been a great asset for the company, which grew off of the innovations of its community, but now, as Twitter looks to evolve and be more palatable to more people, it seems to be holding it back.
Twitter needs to strike a balance between maintaining its base and exciting the masses.
A Tale of Two Companies
No platform has evolved more successfully than Facebook, which started out as a community for college students and then expanded to adding high school students and then everybody. Facebook’s time and time again implemented changes that initially angered users but were soon embraced, and Facebook’s user growth hasn’t wavered.
Foursquare is a different story. The platform (which I am personally a fan of) made the decision to split its app into two a little over a year ago: Swarm and Foursquare. Swarm kept much of the functionality of the old Foursquare app, while Foursquare became a location suggestion engine. The split was intended to make Foursquare embraced by more users. The move actually seems to have backfired with fewer people using both apps. Foursquare risked alienating its base to grow in users and ended up having neither. That being said, Foursquare still shows promise, but it may be preparing to be acquired.
It’s the Story of Business
Twitter’s trials are nothing new to the business world. Every large company has had to make decisions on what to change and what to maintain at the risk of alienating current users. The ones that are around today did so successfully, but even those businesses are reassessing their offerings all the time as users grow more tech-savvy and competition heats up. There’s no guarantee that businesses that did this successfully in the past can do so again.
I hope Twitter survives, but the next year will be interesting. Twitter may not be what we know it to be today.