How Twitter can save itself

Four product ideas that can revive Twitter

Twitter is in a strange place right now.

Twitter is like the hometown high school quarterback, the darling of the community for the past four years. But now it’s senior year, and the world is asking tough questions that Twitter can’t quite answer. Asking about its future, and what it will do next. Twitter, though, has no clear answers. Twitter doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

Twitter has seen some challenging times recently, both as a public company and as a service used by millions every day. Shareholders have been disappointed by the company’s inability to profit since its last earnings call. But besides profitability stuff, Twitter’s biggest problem lies in its lack of growth. With 302 Million Monthly Active Users — certainly nothing to throw stones at — Twitter’s growth is just way too small given its size and expectations. For context, older brother Facebook gets three times as many people using it every single day than Twitter has using it at least once a month.

This may feel like it’s Apples to Oranges, where the two platforms have different products and markets by an order of magnitude. But passionate users recognize how great Twitter is at bringing tribes of people together, and for consistently breaking news before anyone else. Twitter’s focus on real-time knowledge appeals to a global audience and a fundamental human need of being in-the-know. Twitter’s scope is massive.

Yet when thinking about the product and its limitations, it’s easy to concede that it’s not something for everyone.

Twitter is part social network, part news feed, part RSS feed, part news center. Twitter feels like something that has value for many people in some form, not quite mastering one specific thing for everyone in a defensible way. Because of how scattered and varying the use cases are, even technologists in my community — clones of early adopters who fueled Twitter’s early growth — oftentimes fail to find it useful or even understandable. “I just don’t get Twitter.”

To me, this signals that many of Twitter’s flaws could be inherent to the product. And this matters, because Twitter may stop growing and stop finding larger markets — likely never to engage the billions of connected users around the world — as long as it struggles to understand what exactly it is.

Where Twitter succeeds

By understanding what Twitter does best, and fixing some of its fatal flaws in delivering that value, we could help grow Twitter into a universal consumer service.

As best captured by Nir Eyal’s Hooked, great consumer products can tie their solutions to solving fundamental human needs. When we feel lonely, Facebook provides us instant social connections. When we’re feeling uncertain, we turn to Google and watch the answer autocomplete before our eyes.

And for Twitter? It’s a FOMO killer. I go to Twitter when I want to be in-the-know and participate in my knowledge community. Twitter is to information as Facebook is to relationships, and it’s pretty great at it. So good that it established itself as the de-facto place for breaking news.

With Twitter, I’m able to:

• Know what’s going on in the communities that I care about.
• Have conversations with the leaders and members of those communities.
• Know what’s going on in the larger world around me beyond my communities.

For me, the greatest strength for Twitter— and its greatest source of opportunity — lies in the third point. Twitter is Ground Zero for everything happening in the world. The nature of its platform — where users share concise, public posts that can be broadcasted to anyone’s audience — lends itself to being the place where information has limitless and immediate reach.

Where Twitter fails

However, what Twitter is best known for — surfacing breaking news and live content from around the world — is a surprisingly difficult experience to take part in. Why?

How I use Twitter is a lot like watching hyper-targeted television. My Twitter TV is tuned to just one personalized channel that I’ve carefully curated. When I follow users, it’s like I’m choosing which shows will broadcast within the channel, and their tweets are the episodes that I watch. It’s taken time, but my TV show has maximum signal-to-noise, and it reflects the communities that I care about.

But when events happen outside of our channel, we don’t know how to make sense of it all. An earthquake broke out in X. Political rebellions are happening in Y. This information lives in Twitter, but it lives beyond my channel in a form that lacks narrative or meaning, loosely unified by a few hashtags. Extracting value from something that didn’t exist or matter to me until right now is an inherently difficult task. When I explore hashtags, I’m paralyzed by information overload. I’m greeted with a barrage of tweets from the Firehose, equal in weight and equally meaningless.

When we follow users behind these trends to stay updated, it adds noise to our well-curated experience (RIP the lost potential of Twitter Lists). I might be interested in these topics right now, but I’m not interested in following earthquake experts or Kentucky Derby analysts in perpetuity. Manually curating a feed is a binary relationship — either follow them or don’t. Which begs the question: Once I find relevant voices around a trend, how do I not dilute my core experience?

Where Twitter could be exceptional at highlighting the world around me, it fails. When Twitter Trends matter, I end up just turning on my actual TV, abandoning Twitter and all that work associated with it.

In other words, there is huge opportunity to improve Twitter.

Four potential solutions

The following product tweaks could turn Twitter’s biggest failures into its biggest strengths. These solutions are not perfect, but they represent a first stab at solving these common problems.

Curated trends with a zoom functionality

To solve the problem of ‘where does breaking news live and how can I get value out of it?’, Twitter can enhance the functionality of a trending topic by curating different levels of focus for each trend. Think of it as a zoom feature for a topic, where users can explore a trend at their pace based on how familiar and interested they are with a topic. Users can zoom in or out and refine their focus, navigating from a high-level view all the way to the in-the-trenches Firehose feed.

At the highest level, relevant tweets and credible users with broad appeal are surfaced to the top. This includes sources that give background information for a generally uninformed audience, where the tweets are organized by narrative and value instead of by reverse-chron. When users zoom in, Twitter can surface supplementary content and recent developments that build upon the foundation, adding color and commentary that otherwise wouldn’t make sense.

Twitter has made progress in this avenue, but there is plenty of opportunity for improvement.

A Follow Feature for trends

Users should be able to follow trends, just as users can follow accounts. When I follow someone, I’m bound to the reverse-chron feed of their posts; when I follow trends, I follow the curated feed and I’m kept abreast as news develops, without committing to the users behind the tweets. With trends, following an expert’s tweets isn’t as important as following the meaningful tweets from a group of experts. This relieves me from the burden of vetting users and fitting them in to my curated feed. I can be a stakeholder of news without inviting its entire community to live in my channel.

A separate feed for following trends

These trends that I’m following should be able to live outside of my main feed. This experience should be separate from my highly curated channel, where I’m not afraid of diluting my primary experience. Having a separate feed allows me to take part in different communities without the cognitive overhead of sorting and organizing unrelated tweets. When my interest feigns, I can change channels and I’m right back to my primary feed.

A fade feature for trends

Twitter could also let users follow trends for a finite amount of time, where trends I follow will organically fade away as my interest drops off. I have an unconscious bias against following new people when trends break out. I’ve made an investment in my Twitter TV channel, and I’m wary of diluting that asset when my interest wanes in the near future. As trends peak and trough, trends that I’m following can disappear from visibility, whether automatically or through some user input. I can be a stakeholder of a trend’s community without committing to the full membership of it.

A sidenote

This is a natural place for live video and hyper-focused commentary to live, a literal application of the TV metaphor. For breaking news, video producers can broadcast within the trend and own the topic’s narrative. These producers can create many pieces of content that live in different parts of a trend’s feed, varied in its focus and curated around the topic’s level of zoom. Producers can begin with a high-level introduction, and then add in live segments and supporting content that adds depth as users zoom in.

Twitter could also apply a Quality Score-like value to users and their content based on how it relates to trends. The natural extension is that Twitter can monetize trends, where lower quality producers and smaller voices can get prominent reach through paid placements. Sources can be rewarded for quality content and earn high positions, while those with low scores can pay for that privileged reach.

I believe in the full potential of Twitter. And I believe that Twitter can expand into growth markets as a tool for disseminating breaking news. For Twitter to grow, it needs to improve how users discover trending information outside of their finely-tuned communities.

This is especially true for new users, who are often introduced to Twitter for its role in real-time information. By creating exceptional experiences around trending content, Twitter can lay claim to the desire of being in-the-know, as new users take advantage of Twitter in those moments when trends truly matter. FOMO is an experience universal to all people and cultures.

These solutions are just the tip of the iceberg for Twitter’s evolution as a universal, global tool. No matter what, I’m excited to see how Twitter evolves a huge opportunity into an incredible strength.

What do your think? Could this help solve Twitter’s growth issues? Let me know in the comments.