What’s Wrong with Twitter (and How do You Fix it?)

Much has been made about the doom and gloom surrounding Twitter in recent months. There’s the sliding share price — which hit a record low only a few weeks back. There was the drawn-out process of searching for a new CEO, then settling on an old one, which raised the eyebrows of many. And there’s the question of slowing user growth — the platform’s struggled to add new users, with its audience expansion falling well short of analyst estimates and expectations. And while overall revenue has continued to rise, that, too, is now projected to be lower than anticipated.

And the pressure of such developments is obviously taking a toll — just today, Twitter announced that several members of their executive team will be leaving the company, signalling yet another stage of re-assessment and re-alignment.

So what does this all mean? Does this spell the end for Twitter as we know it? Do all these changes point to a takeover, as many suggest?

For what it may (or may not) be worth, here are my thoughts on where Twitter’s at and what they could do to improve on some key fronts.

Problem One: Losing Control

One of Twitter’s key issues has been data control. While other social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, operate ‘walled gardens’, where their personal data and insights is restricted from public view, Twitter is, by design, the opposite — virtually everything posted to Twitter is available to anyone who goes looking for it. This is how it has to be — Twitter’s the ‘global town square’, the place where people go to participate and add their insights into wider, trending conversations — people use Twitter as a real-time pulse of the issues and happenings of the world. But the problem with this is that Twitter’s data is being used by an ever-growing number of third party providers for monitoring, insights and other forms of tracking, much of which Twitter has little control over, and gains little revenue from.

What’s worse, some of these platforms actually reduce the need for users to visit Twitter proper, as all the data and insights are available in by other means. That then reduces Twitter’s capacity to monetize that wider audience — and as noted, user growth (both in terms of acquiring new users and time spent on platform) is a major concern for the micro-blog giant.

To combat this, Twitter’s been restricting access via their APIs. They’ve actually been doing this for years, trying to implement some form of control over their data feeds and get people back to their platform more often. The biggest recent example of this was the decision to eliminate share counts — while Twitter explained this as a system change (which may well be true), the perception was that Twitter eliminated share counts in order to push more people towards paying for data from Gnip, Twitter’s data arm, in order to access the same insights, thereby enabling Twitter to a) make money from their data and b) get people to use their own platform instead of going elsewhere.

Whether that is or isn’t the case, it would clearly benefit Twitter if they could get more people to use their platform instead of gathering tweet-based information and insights from other providers. The whole social media monitoring industry is effectively built on Twitter, it’s logical that the company would want to ensure they’re getting a cut of the revenue generated in that space — and also, to leverage that attention in order to build greater audience share.

Solution: Do What Third-Party Providers are Doing — But Better

Here’s the thing — Twitter has access to all the data and insight used to fuel these analytics tools. Twitter actually has access to more insights on this front and can implement more ways to manipulate their data and find the signals amidst the noise. So why not use them?

In effect, Twitter can provide their own versions of every monitoring, tracking and tweet search tool on the market — and those versions would likely be better, as they’re coming direct from the provider. Twitter should take note of the applications and tools that are generating significant use and attention and develop their own alternatives, variations of the same functionality built into Twitter’s own analytics dashboards, thereby giving users less reason to go anywhere else for the same insights.

While tweets remain, in the majority, public — and as noted, by design, Twitter will always be an open network — Twitter won’t be able to control how their data is being used. Not totally, anyway. Better to either work with the third party providers for best benefit — for users and the company — or offer better tools to beat feeder companies at their own game.

It may seem simplistic, but imagine if Twitter had a Topsy-like search functionality built into the official analytics platform? Imagine a Nuzzel type tool, a TrendsMap.

All of these tools generate significant use, all of them are fuelled by tweets. Surely it would be of more benefit for Twitter to be offering better, ‘official’ data use tools within their own system, bringing users to their platform instead. The concern could be that such tools may undermine the value of Gnip, but they’re available now anyway, people can use these third party tools already.

Rather than push the developer community away, Twitter should be working with them and using them to help find ways to better utilize and showcase Twitter data. Such innovations can help the company develop better tools and services, and better ways to build an all-encompassing on-platform experience.

Problem Two: Mess and Noise

One of the biggest, and rising, criticisms of Twitter is that the platform is now awash with spam and junk, to the point of being useless as a news and information source. Spend any time on Twitter and you’ll see this — people who follow you only so they can hit you with spam messages via DM, automated bots tweeting out the same, promotional messages over and over, link-dropping that’s so repetitive it’s become meaningless. Click through on any trending hashtag and you’ll see dozens of off-message, spam tweets with the relevant hashtag tacked on, trying to hijack attention. It’s annoying, for sure, and a side-effect of the platform’s popularity, but can it be stopped or negated somehow?

Twitter, for their part, has tried to combat this — the development of their new Moments product came about because Twitter wanted to showcase the great content of Twitter without the clutter of the junk. Through Moments, users are shown the most relevant, real-time tweets on certain topics and issues, as chosen by Twitter’s editorial team. Not a bad idea, but the solution also offers its own problem — what’s important to Twitter’s editors may not actually be important to me, so while I’m getting a more refined stream of content on a subject I’m interested in, without the spam, I’m also not getting comments from my friends and people I care about, and without that personalisation, Moments is not as effective. Social media offers users unprecedented control over their media inputs — taking that capacity away, in any form, is a step back.

What Twitter needs is a way to filter the tweet stream to uncover the most relevant content, as defined by each individual user. Lists are currently the best way to do this, but Twitter doesn’t want to promote lists too heavily because they don’t have as much advertising potential as your regular tweet stream (I use lists pretty exclusively and I can’t remember the last time I saw a sponsored tweet or ad in a List stream).

So what then? An algorithm? A Facebook-style algorithm has been proposed for Twitter feeds, and Facebook’s clearly had success with this approach. Over time, Facebook’s gradually trained its users on how to refine and improve their News Feed to make their on-platform experience more relevant to them — which is actually how Facebook’s been able to take audience attention away from Twitter, because now, with the Facebook News Feed attuned to the topics and content most relevant to each user, more and more people are using Facebook as a news source, where they once would’ve gone to Twitter for the same updates.

So would an algorithm work on Twitter? One thing’s for sure, people wouldn’t be too happy with only seeing some of the tweets posted by people they follow. That’s no different from Facebook, of course, and over time, Facebook’s been able to show people how not seeing every single update from every one of their connections actually improves their on-platform experience. But initially, people were angry about the change — and given the rapid pace at which tweets flow by, users would no doubt prefer to maintain control over the tweets they see, and whom they see them from.

And really, this brings us back to lists. Rather than implementing a whole algorithm, Twitter could just better educate users on how to use lists to filter the noise — they’d just need to incorporate more ad content into list feeds to boost their value, which wouldn’t be a huge change.

But then again, while highlighting lists might help filter the noise for current users, it won’t do much for non-users or help solve the issue of stalled user growth. One of the key aims of Moments is to highlight to new users why they should be using Twitter, that there is great content amidst the noise. In this application, neither improved lists nor an algorithm would do much to help.

So how do you reduce the noise to signal ratio of the Twitter experience in a way that will also appeal to both new and existing users?

Solution: Introduce Personalised Trending Topics and Follow Recommendations

I know what you’re thinking, Twitter already does this, right? Well not exactly.

Twitter does already have both Trending Content and ‘Who to Follow’ tools, but they’re not targeted. At least, not to the levels at which Twitter could possibly focus them. Twitter needs to use its data insights to better personalise the experience of each individual user — this is what Facebook does, and Twitter has enough data to do similar. But rather than focus on filtering the actual tweet stream (like Facebook’s News Feed), Twitter should focus on utilising its data to make its trending topics and follow recommendations irresistible for each user.

For example, my current ‘Trending Topics’ list looks like this:

That’s a pretty generic listing, I’ve got little to no interest in any of those. And I’m a pretty active Twitter user — Twitter could easily infer, from my on-platform activity, what I’m actually interested in.

The same goes for the on-boarding process — when you sign up for Twitter, the options you’re given in terms of the data you provide the platform to show what you’re interested in is very broad — this is the full topic selection you have for what interests you when opening a new account (in Australia):

Personally, I don’t know that I’m interested in any of them, but I selected ‘AU Business Leaders’ because it’s closest to my interest, which is social media marketing. From that, I got another very generic listing of who to follow:

There were 40 listed. I would’ve considered following two of them. Maybe. You do also, of course, have the option of adding connections from your contacts list, but that’s becoming less relevant considering the way more and more people are using Twitter as a news and information source, as opposed to a way to stay in touch with friends. And those two, really, are your only options, then you have a feed of ‘interesting content’, as defined by Twitter. Not very targeted, not attuned to user preferences.

And Twitter wonders why users aren’t all-in from the opening bounce.

What’s frustrating is that Twitter has way more ways to work out what you, personally, are interested in, and way more data points to utilize in making your Twitter experience more individually relevant.

How do I know this? Because I can get much better recommendations on this front from other apps that are actually built on Twitter data — for instance, what if, instead of a random ‘Who to Follow’ listing, I could actually locate and select users likely to be of most interest to me, like I can in BuzzSumo.

As you can see, in BuzzSumo, I can enter in ‘social media’ and ‘Australia’ as my location, and straight away I’ve got a much more relevant listing of recommendations on who to follow than any Twitter itself has ever provided — in fact, even if I look up ‘Business’ in BuzzSumo the listing is more relevant.

And this is entirely built upon Twitter’s own data, these recommendations come from information within Twitter — why can’t Twitter better focus their ‘Who to follow’ listings in the same way, and/or give new users the option to nominate topics of interest to them, rather than a limited tick a box list?

The same goes for trending topics — rather than a generic listing, what if Twitter filtered information in the same way Nuzzel does to highlight the content that’s likely to be of most relevance to you based on who you follow or by subject. For example, if I enter ‘social media’ into Nuzzel, it comes up with these lists as recommendations to subscribe to:

And below that, these are the most shared articles on Twitter in that topic space:

And that’s before you’ve built your own following and network on Twitter — once you’ve done that, Nuzzel highlights the most shared content from within your own network, making it even more targeted.

Recommendations like these are far more relevant to me than the generic listings. And even if you do want to include overall Trending Topics, make it a new tab, give users the option of a personalised listing of most shared and discussed topics, based on their interests and activities, as well as a general one — or various options separated by tabs (and excuse the rudimentary image editing work).

Twitter has the capacity to build an algorithm based on your on-platform activities and connections to build highly focussed, intelligent listings of recommendations and pointers to get you engaging more with tweet content. Jack Dorsey himself has said things like this many times:

If that’s true, then prove it. If Twitter is made ‘for the people and by the people’ and is ‘the fastest way to see what the entire world is saying about any topic’, then use that data and insight to build better matches for recommendations on topics and who people should be following. There are 500 million tweets sent per day, more than enough info to formulate intelligent correlations and patterns — if 80% of people who follow Person X also follow Person Y, then that remaining 20% will probably like Person Y too, right? And base those recommendations not only on follower counts, but on actual interactions and responses, on how each person, individually, generates engagement (and who from).

Make those recommendations impossible to ignore, so much so that no user is able to resist clicking on them. The more enticing those matches are, the more people will stick around, and the more useful the platform will be — and that’s the key education point for new users. ‘The more data you provide us, the more customised and relevant we can make your Twitter experience’ — then build a system that learns individual relevance over time.

Problem Three: Growing Pains

And then there’s the issue of user growth. While smarter recommendations will, I believe, help in this regard, there’s also the matter of getting more people to care about Twitter in the first place, particularly in the case of younger users. There’s no one solution to boosting Twitter’s appeal, it’s going to require a range of targeted, intelligent moves that will keep the platform front of mind and keep people coming back to check out the new features and options.

Here’s a couple of ways the platform could look to bring in new audiences (and in some cases already is).

Integrate Periscope Entirely into Twitter — Recently, Twitter announced that Periscope content will now autoplay in Twitter feeds. That’s great, that’s a big step for both Twitter and Periscope individually, but I think they should go a step further. Periscope should be integrated entirely into the Twitter experience.

By this, I mean no more Periscope. Periscope would become another option within the tweet composition window — you want to do a live-stream, you do it on Twitter. Why would that help? Because Periscope’s audience is building, their platform has grown to more than 10 million users watching the equivalent of 40 years worth of video content on the platform every day. Why not have all that engagement on Twitter? That would get more audience to Twitter, enable Twitter to show ads to those users — why filter those people off to another app when Twitter would work just fine as a host for such content?

By enabling all users to stream direct from their tweet composition window — as they will soon be able to do on Facebook — you’ll encourage more users to try it out, and while you’d be losing the live content specific platform of Periscope, where people can go to watch live content, you’d still be able to build a similar platform within Twitter, keeping more users on site for longer.

Live-streaming is growing, more people are looking to utilize the option to better share their message. Having Periscope streams distributed through Twitter is a good move, but integrating Periscope entirely into the Twitter experience is a better move for the parent company’s goals of user growth and on-platform interaction.

Increase Tweet Length — This is a contentious one, some people see the possible extension of the tweet character limit as being fundamentally against the ethos of what Twitter’s about. And that’s kind of true, but when you consider how they’re actually (reportedly) looking to implement this, it’s a little bit different. By increasing the length of tweets, you won’t actually see massive, 1,000 word tweets filling up your streams, you’ll actually see something more like this:

In that sense, it’s not as big a deal, and when you consider the increasing number of people who’re now screen-shotting text to circumvent the character limit anyway, it makes sense for Twitter to implement such an option. What’s more, more text = more data, which Twitter can then use to better personalise and improve the user experience. I suspect this’ll happen sooner rather than later.

Pay More Attention to International Markets — Okay, Twitter does actually make good efforts in international markets, but oftentimes new releases and tests are exclusively conducted in the US. That makes sense, America’s where Twitter’s based, but it may be of benefit to give some other regions more access to exclusives to boost attention and awareness within those regions.

This is particularly relevant when you look at Twitter’s current audience share splits:

US audience numbers have flatlined, international audiences continue to grow. It makes sense for Twitter to put more focus on those markets where they are seeing growth — which, as noted, they do, but they could highlight more specifically.

On this front, Twitter should also consider building a ‘low-fi’ version for emerging markets where data access isn’t as freely available. Facebook’s going to dominate some of these new areas via internet.org — Twitter needs to get on board where they can.

Focus on Customer Service — Twitter’s already working on this too, and when you consider that 80% of customer service requests on social are coming via Twitter, it really is an area where Twitter needs to place major emphasis. Facebook’s already coming for them on this front, introducing new call to action and Page messaging functions to get more customer queries coming through Facebook, so Twitter needs to put in the work to highlight to all business owners why they need to be on Twitter.

Why not send out individualized data on Twitter mentions to businesses? “Here’s an example of how your brand is being discussed on Twitter — time to act”. Messaging like that, specific to each business contacted, you’d think would be effective (and maybe this type of outreach is already happening), but building/improving/evolving customer service options on the platform is key.

Add GIF Search In-Stream/New Emoji Features — When new messaging app Peach was released recently, one of its standout features was it’s in-stream emoji search, which lets you look up and add GIF to your message quickly and easily, and without leaving the app.

That functionality would fit perfectly into Twitter — imagine being able to search Giphy for GIFs to append to your Tweets more easily. It also works with the wider GIF and animated content trend, which can only help boost Twitter’s appeal among younger users.

Along that line, Twitter’s also, reportedly, experimenting with a new emoji response option to replace the ‘heart’ for ‘Like’ (itself recently changed).

Both of these additions would work with the wider trends of using graphic in text communications and should be implemented to boost engagement. Twitter’s already pretty active on the hashtag emoji front, and emoji are being used more and more on the platform. Better facilitating this would be a good move.

Highlight the Strength and Value of Twitter Data — Twitter should be seeking to have every media outlet on every major story referring to Twitter data in their reports. Why would they do this? Because Twitter is the real-time pulse of the world, Twitter can uncover trends and predict outcomes — as Jack Dorsey says, 10–15 minutes before anyone else. As such, Twitter needs to be taking the opportunity to highlight this strength and showcase why the platform is so valuable. If more people were considering Twitter, if more people were seeing reports saying, essentially, ‘you need to be on Twitter, it’s well-ahead of everywhere else’, more people likely would be active on Twitter. It’s somewhat theoretical, and there may not be an easy way to do it, but Twitter needs to showcase its strength on this front.

These are just some of the many ways Twitter could look to boost awareness of tweets and get more users to the platform. And, of course, I’m an outsider, I don’t have any internal insight into how difficult these would be to implement or what might actually be in place already. But these are some ways Twitter could work to build the platform, turn around general perception and get back on track. I believe in Twitter as a transformative communications tool, and I think it can maintain its position as a key source of news and insights.

Hopefully, in 2016, we see the tides start to turn.