What A Successful Twitter Looks Like
It seems ironic that in the age of short-form information, the platform for short-form content is in some short term trouble. Despite having a similar number of users to say, Instagram, the consensus on Twitter seems to be it hasn’t fulfilled it’s long-term or even near-term potential. Most damningly, most don’t talk about it as a long term media platform (or even a mass-market platform).
Full disclosure: I’m a big believer in Twitter. And think the assessments on it’s future have been fairly short sighted (namely revenue, not user, focused).
Take two similar platforms in terms of MAUs and audience — Instagram and Twitter. The differences in positivity and sentiment (with revenue/Sheryl Sandberg as the major differences, realistically).
“It’s not far-fetched to think that with app download ads in their portfolio, Instagram ads could exceed $100 million per quarter in sales immediately after [a wide-scale rollout],” said Marc Poirier, a cofounder and vp at Acquisio.
“In addition, some of our TWTR agency conversations remain tepid, with marketers flagging TWTR’s limited scalability (aka reach) as a factor holding back ad budgets. The competition for users’ time and advertisers’ mobile and social ad dollars is rising, too, as other platforms — like Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube — with stronger user and/or engagement growth continue to increase their push for ad dollars.” (Morgan Stanley analysts).
Statistically, there isn’t much difference between the platforms. But of course Instagram is seen as a much loved platform by users — but Twitter isn’t.
There are three parts to Twitter’s tomorrow story that I’ll go through today:
- How the social web has changed, and why Twitter has been left behind (the past).
- Twitter’s own identity crisis (the present).
- Where Twitter has a place in the world, and why it will succeed (the future).
The changing social web
The social web used to be relatively simple — text-based, networked information. People basically used it to filter updates from friends and families.
A strange shift happened, though, with SnapChat and Instagram. Both platforms introduced the idea of creativity and tools to their platform. It changed them from being simple tools to send an update, to tools that created content.
For Facebook, this was okay — mainly because they still monopolised deep update based functionality (e.g relationship status, large photo albums and similar). But Twitter was based on fast, short-form updates. In many ways it made the platform boring.
In 2014 this trend was most accentuated through the rise of visual content in marketing. We saw that visual content had the most shares, specifically photos.
Whilst a lot of this content was natively Facebook, 2014 was also the year Instagram integrated into Facebook, which meant a creative platform was now publishing onto a more mainstream, functional platform.
We saw this trend get more pronounced as time goes on — and as video plays a more important role going forward.
Twitter never had strong functionality in the areas of video, even though it had Vine (which has a large volume of loops but low membership base — around 40 million).
Interestingly a lot of Instagrammers were also Vine users (around 20% of Instagram’s users total), which suggests the platform was used more for it’s looping capability than for it’s pure video capability. The introduction of Boomerang is likely to change the behaviour of users and make it harder for Vine to bring users in from Instagram in the future.
And so, Twitter is left behind. The social web has gotten more visual, more creative and more connected — meaning there is little place for the raw, quite clunky functionality that Twitter offers. Twitter isn’t a mainstream social network because it doesn’t offer the creative depth, nor the functionality of other platforms.
Twitter’s own identity crisis
The irony of most social network’s is they have a clearly defined use-case in whatever they do. When they go to market, they know why they go to market. And they know how to measure that as well.
Take Instagram: “We’re building Instagram to allow you to experience moments in your friends’ lives through pictures as they happen.” Okay, so they’re about making a picture as visual and compelling as possible.
Take Facebook: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” They’re about providing ways for people to share content to a bunch of their mates.
Twitter’s current identity crisis mirrors it’s positioning in market — they’re largely following others and relying on other’s missions and metrics. They’re not defining their metric for success — they’re letting the market do that. As a result, they’re not being measured on what they’re good at, nor are they chasing what they’re good at.
What is Twitter good for right now? Basically, breaking news. It’s a purely user generated network (no algorithms) and as such, topics of interest tend to break faster. But Twitter’s current measurements sits around tweets (ineffective at communicating it’s true value) and active users (again, ineffective at the role it plays).
Dick Costolo was actually onto something when he identified news as a key outlet for Twitter. How many tweets do you see embedded into news stories these days? On news.com.au for example, it isn’t Facebook or Instagram used to look at commentary on current events — it’s Twitter.
In short, Twitter has failed to do two things:
- Define their own metrics for success. Their business is their business — and success from a user perspective should be on their own terms.
- Focus on their own identity. There’s no such thing as a social network. There’s only platforms that help people do social things. Instead of being everything, be something.
The future — where Twitter needs to go
Twitter’s future isn’t all bleak. It’s still being used in an incredibly unique way — and instead of trying to break into the mainstream, Twitter should be embracing the niche that it owns.
What’s that niche? Real-time events. Twitter has got to be the go-to-platform for breaking real-time events, and measure itself against that as success.
It works when you look at their most recent (big) acquisition — Periscope. Periscope was a step in the right direction for Twitter, allowing brands to live-stream their activity. Moreso than any other platform, Twitter is perfect to do this. They’re the only true ‘open’ social network, which allows for the spread of information between networks in a very free manner.
Instagram does this quite well, but it’s far less share driven and far harder to spread information. Hashtags are better ways for followers to find people on the platform, and that’s a gap that Twitter should be exploiting.
The product roadmap needs to match this, rather than focusing on MAUs and building the number of pieces of content. Twitter should instead:
- Build out the enablement of real-time content: through video, through images, through influencer commentary.
- Own real-time broadcasting on key events.
- Focus on inserting brands into relevant, powerful real-time events. Sales strategy should focus entirely on real-time marketing (e.g second screening, broadcasting of brand events) rather than using the platform as a day-to-day promotional beast.
- Provide data-driven recommendation/insight on events.
Of course, this is all easy to say. There’s a lot of things Twitter needs to be doing. But by defining it’s purpose and shaping itself around real-time, it at least gives a point of difference in the market.
