TWITTER NEEDS GRANDMAS!
3 things Twitter should do.
Twitter is in trouble. If you follow tech-business news regularly you know this already. The biggest challenge Twitter has to face is to grow its audience, dramatically.
With something like 320 million active users Twitter is big, still it feels something like e niche service. For two reasons:
- Twitter is hard to understand if you’re not familiar with it.
- It’s populated by hundreds of thousands of bots and fake accounts.
So the overall Twitter user experience is poor and unauthentic. When you sign up you get lost and unless you’re a journalist or a digital marketing pro, you run away.
Still Twitter has huge potential for a staggering growth, in my mind way more than Facebook. For one simple reason: Twitter format is the quintessential mobile experience. Concise, fast and in real time. To really achieve this growth Twitter has to be loved by the average mobile user. Even better: if your grandma can understand Twitter, it will become as big as Facebook. Bigger than Facebook.
TWITTER NEEDS GRADMAS!
Here’s 3 things Twitter should do to get grandmas in:
1.PUT CONTENT FIRST.
When you sign up to Twitter you should be asked about two things. 1.what type of content you want: videos, photos, stories. 2. what you’re interested in: news, movies, music, sports and so on. Then it should show you only quality content based on your preferences. This is perfect for content producers too like politicians, sport personalities, news outlets who are sure to get the right audience, with the right content at the right time. On mobile.
This should be a dedicated and unique stream on the home page, call it ‘Stories’, ‘Moments’, whatever, you get the idea. :)
2. MAKE PEOPLE FOLLOW AND BE FOLLOWED ONLY BY WHO THEY KNOW OR THEY CARE ABOUT.
You should not follow everyone on Twitter. Most importantly you should not be followed by everyone randomly, especially bots and fake accounts. So Twitter user profiles must be divided into two categories: 1.public and 2.private. The first is the profile of public personas, companies, magazines, musicians. All the quality content producers. You follow them you get any content from them, pretty much like Facebook pages. They can’t follow you. The second is the regular profile but with an important difference from today’s Twitter: if I want to follow someone I have to provide his/her email. No email, no follow.
This should be a second dedicated and unique stream on the home page. Call it ‘Following’.
3. TURN ITS DIRECT MESSAGES SYSTEM INTO A CLOSED PRIVATE CHAT.
When you follow and are followed only by people you care it’s pretty likely you want to communicate with them privately. Building a chat system is not something breakthrough but it will make people spend more quality time on Twitter.
I’m sure my grandma would undestand Twitter if it worked this way. I’m sure she would check Twitter out for a quick and simple way to get informations, enterntainment and stay connected.
She would definitely jump in!
