Twitter has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism and high level problems recently, not least of which is losing the CEO and the stock price tumbling. People have been quick to jump on the company and criticise but I don’t think Twitter is fatally flawed as some suggest. Of the online services I’ve had over the last six years, it’s the one I’ve enjoyed using the most, so here’s my thoughts on what Twitter needs to do and not do to be relevant in the future.

1. Don’t try to be Facebook

A lot of its problems seem to be coming from people comparing it to Facebook, the giant behemoth of the social media world, but Twitter isn’t Facebook and it shouldn’t try to be. If you follow the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, effectively Facebook is for discussing people, whereas Twitter is more about discussing ideas, and it should hold onto that difference. It will be never will be as big as Facebook as there will always be more ‘small minds’ wanting to chat and gossip with friends than discuss news and ideas with strangers. It should accept that, because having 300 million users is far from failure and still more than enough to play with.

Facebook does seem to have done a great job monetising its platform and making money in the mobile space. Twitter hasn’t succeeded there yet but they shouldn’t look to emulate Facebook because to achieve it they’ve had to turn the news feed into one big ad-filled stream. This is one option, but it’s also a destructive method and one that risks turning off users in the long run.

Twitter should think about how they can give value to content providers and perhaps offer the opposite of what Facebook are doing with hijacking news content on Facebook Instant. A danger of news stories living on Facebook and others copying this approach is that it becomes like music on Spotify or Apple Music (or even Tidal), with some artists on one platform and not the others. The user ends up not knowing which service to sign up for or they have to get subscriptions to multiple ones just to find a few pieces of content.

This ‘walled garden’ approach misses the point of the web and doesn’t do your users any favours. Twitter can be *the* web-wide discovery engine of great content wherever it has come from — big news site or small blog — without the producers having to give over any of their writing or content to them.

2. Improve onboarding

Another key area where Twitter seems to be struggling is in keeping new users. This is a problem of people signing up for an account but then not getting enough value from the product quickly, so they leave and don’t come back. This is where I agree with the negative press: fail at this and you’ll bring big problems upon yourself. Twitter are too big to be doing that.

Currently they are doing a pretty poor job of onboarding. The main thing they want to do when you first sign up is choose to follow famous brands or celebrity accounts which really only appeals to certain type of user. What about the people who haven’t come there to hear from celebs?

There has been talk of something called Project Lightning which might be the solution for showing new users the power of what Twitter can offer for live events or news stories. This does sound like a promising approach, particularly if they can aggregate the tweets of everyday people and show the power of the masses in covering a big event with one click. The first time you see Twitter in full flow during a live event you realise how powerful and compelling it can be.

3. Curated by people

There seem to be plenty of new sites and companies wanting to use machines to curate content or solve the job of filtering and telling users what they should be reading/looking at next. However I think Twitter is already there with a powerful method for recommending content through using real people. If they can harness this further and bring all of the great content being shared on the site every day to lots more people that would be a good move.

They don’t currently do a great job of suggesting which new people you should follow so there’s a bit of a way to go on their recommendation front but they should be able to use the masses of historical data to know the kind of things you’re going to be interested in. If they can suggest relevant content to users then it could own the position as the web’s primary content discovery point. I mainly use Twitter as a kind of personalised RSS reader, following the people that I’m interested in, but the more it can give me tangential stuff from people I haven’t found yet then the better it becomes.

4. Serendipity

This point is related but effectively the opposite to number three. One of the things I love about Twitter is the serendipity that occurs within it. Particularly if you’re following people you don’t know in real life and they retweet other people you don’t know, you can quickly come across new sites or content. Thus often things will come up that you would otherwise never find out about and wouldn’t have thought to look for.

The danger that Twitter faces is that if they try too hard to onboard users and push them down the news experience or compete with Facebook and fill the platform with ads then they lose this rather charming feature it currently has. The rest of the web is currently being filled with filter bubbles where you are only being shown content that you already interested in. Whilst it is true sometimes Twitter can be an echo chamber of opinions, every day there’s always new content that crops up and surprises me. Though this is hard to design for, it is something they should be careful not to lose.