Oh Twitter, you’re still a mystery to so many

I’ve been running training workshops in social media and digital related stuff for eight or nine years now. Back then if we were discussing platforms in a group and I asked for a show of hands — “How many of you have heard of Twitter?”, it would only ever be one or two hands. Now of course most everyone has heard of it and, according to Twitter some 320m people use it every month. This figure, while not to be sniffed at, is dwarfed by Facebook’s staggering 1.55bn monthly active users.

Recently Twitter has had well publicised troubles. The CEO left, founder Jack Dorsey stepped back up to the top job but it’s still not clear to investors and analysts whether they’re headed in the right direction.

Anecdotally, amongst friends who work in the tech, digital or comms sector, I’m hearing increasing talk of people losing interest in Twitter. They’re saying that conversations are down, engagement is down, it’s too spammy and somehow not has useful or interesting as it was. There has even been analyses that suggest a much more nuanced problem lies at the heat of Twitter’s troubles. All of this may well be the case and previous die-hard users becoming increasingly less active represent a big problem for Twitter. But for now let’s leave that aside because surprising though it may be to many, there are still a whole heap of people who haven’t even started with Twitter. And therein lies a much bigger problem for the platform: those people just don’t get it. At all.

To illustrate the point, I was training yesterday with a great bunch of people from the arts sector, they were whip smart, funny and creative. They understood their audiences, what they wanted and how to reach them through lots of different channels. But Twitter? They find it genuinely confusing. And this is not unusual, I regularly speak to people who feel this way. But this week in particular it struck me anew how counter intuitive the platform is. Facebook may not be the darling of the tech community but it is at least obvious from the outset how you use it. Add some friends, see posts from those friends, ah ok, that makes sense. Whereas Twitter, what’s a username — is it my real name? What’s the @ symbol, what’s a hashtag? If I tweet does everyone I follow see it or people who are following me? And what’s with the follow/following thing, it can be different people? You get the idea.

In no particular order, here are the things that non Twitter users find odd about Twitter and in this I see the kernel of Twitter’s real, difficult problem in pushing past their current pain point. All this is caveated with the acknowledgement that I know people can learn how to use Twitter but if you’re new to Twitter, you come to it like you came to Facebook, not expecting to have to work hard to understand it, it should just make sense.

So here is a list of all the things that new users find utterly confusing:

Who do they follow? And how do they find them? Twitter suggests some famous people or whatnot when they’re really looking for people in their area who might be interested in their theatre.

Looking at the (logged in) home page of Twitter.com shows tweets but then you have to click somewhere else to see notifications? Again, compare to Facebook, it just happens, on one page, on Facebook it’s pretty much immediately obvious how to reply to someone or join in a conversation.

On that note the @ sign. It may seem unbelievable to those that use Twitter all the time but I can guarantee you that for lots of people it is bizarre and not at all clear what its purpose is. The hashtag even more so. To be fair to Twitter, obviously they didn’t purposefully invent the use of the hashtag on the platform but the fact remains that its existence adds a further layer of confusion for new users. Typical questions about hashtags I get a lot: What are they for? How should I use them? Where do I register a hashtag? Where do I go to look at them?

The fact that Twitter looks different because there are different tools to use it. Facebook is Facebook. Instagram is Instagram. Whether .com or on the mobile app they look the same and work the same. But Twitter has a whole host of other tools that often new users have sometimes heard of — Hootsuite or tweetdeck — but have no clue why you would need them. The mere fact of their existence is confusing.

The final one is the trickiest hurdle of all for Twitter to sort since it relates ironically to their (possibly only) real point of difference to other social networks. The real-time, fast paced nature of Twitter can be confusing to new users. Unlike Facebook, on which conversations remain tied to the original post and therefore have more context, tweets appear (at least to new users) as disembodied snippets floating. They’re trying to address this with features like Moments but I fear that again, for new users, it doesn’t make the platform any clearer.

I have always loved Twitter. It’s introduced me to many, many amazing people, I’ve learned a ton of things, I’ve laughed loads. But in the wider world I’m still very much in the minority.