A Suggestion for Twitter’s Growth Problem
Twitter has a growth problem.
It’s not a big secret. Growth has been nearly stagnate in the United States. The platform needs something to gain traction again & with the most recent exec. departure, they’ll be revamping some critical operations. They even launched a TV commercial from the same agency that did the famous 1989 Apple campaign.. Yet, they need to do more.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is one of my favorite platforms and I do believe Jack Dorsey can bring this company back on track, even while managing two public companies. Twitter’s growth strategy focus has been to onboard brands and that’s great; but without regular users, brands don’t care to be on the platform.
Twitter & News
Twitter in my opinion is one of the best sources for up-to-date news and stories. Twitter launched it’s moments feature this summer to highlight that it revolves around world news and events. Moments neatly curate topics happening in the world through Tweets.
Facebook just reported 1.59b users. That’s an incredible milestone and not surprising for the giant. But how did Facebook get there? One of the most notorious strategies Facebook used was bringing their ‘Like’ button to almost every single webpage on the planet. It integrated Facebook into everyday life, made things easy to share and made you feel like you were missing things if you weren’t apart of it. You can share to Twitter via webpages, but it can feel like your voice is sent into a blackhole of communication.
My solution: Twitter Tags
TL;DR —Twitter Tags; a live Twitter stream of the hashtag/keywords within webpage articles & stories.
Twitter basically invented the hashtag and although they exist in almost every platform now (including Facebook), they are at the heart of the Twittersphere. Hashtags drive the conversation around topics, so why aren’t they better implemented into webpages?
While reading a story about actors boycotting the Oscars with #OscarsSoWhite (no opinion on the matter), I thought of a way to make people want to get involved in the conversation. The way the hashtag was presented, made me want to interact with it. Here is what I had in mind:
*Concept
Onboarding
By enabling “Twitter Tags”, it would allow people to check realtime Tweets about a topic within an article. This would raise awareness of Twitter through the millions of stories that get published a day. Therefore, demonstrating Twitter to potential users without them being signed in. To prompt them to sign up, after about 15–20 Tweets down users would receive this message:
So if you’re reading this Ev Williams, please help Jack and the Twitter team out.