Within You, Without You: Expanding Twitter’s Conversation Borders
Twitter has been the center of attention for the last few days.
The excitement began with planned changes to the timeline, paired with the forced shutdown of Twitpic over branding issues. Twitter is taking action to please investors who seem dissatisfied with slow growth and retention metrics – but they’re going about it entirely the wrong way. Twitter shouldn’t be adding algorithms to the user timeline, and certainly shouldn’t be showing tweets from accounts the user isn’t following.
Twitter should launch a commenting platform; something not dissimilar to Facebook Comments, Disqus, Livefyre, and other commenting services.
It shouldn’t interrupt the conversations going on the platform right now, but instead expand the existing structure to include and engage people outside of the network – those few remaining people who aren’t yet Twitter users.
Let’s talk about Twitter Conversations.
This Conversation is Already Going On
Right now, the average news article has hundreds, if not thousands, of tweets (not including replies), but that is not reflected in the comments left on the articles themselves. With Twitter having positioned itself as the place where people discuss current events and news stories, it makes perfect sense to incorporate the source with the conversation.
If I’m reading an article about a trending story, I want to engage in the conversation surrounding it – whether or not its participants are people I already follow.
Twitter Conversations should be an embedded stream of aggregated tweets for bloggers and news publications to integrate into their platforms.
With that, Twitter will provide those news publications and bloggers with a constant flow of data and new content that will keep a post active long after it was published.
Let Existing Users Follow the Conversation
From the user’s perspective, the current Twitter/news relationship has two major negatives: First, if someone I follow tweets an article, I miss the surrounding discussion, because replies only show up in my feed from people who I follow. Twitter is a discussion-based platform, and many of my followers are people whose conversations I want to take part in.
Secondly, right now Twitter only lets me discover new people via the “Discover” tab, which is extraordinarily user-unfriendly.
When I’m following a news story, I’m much more open to discovering and following people who are similarly engaged. We already know that Twitter wants to show me tweets from people I don’t follow (in order to fill up my feed) – which could be accomplished logically by showing me users who are similar to me, not tweets and users chosen at random.
Create a Powerful Call to Action
Twitter lets bloggers embed Tweets into their posts’ body, when the Tweet is part of the story itself, but that doesn’t incentivize users to interact – there’s no reason to reply, retweet, follow, or otherwise engage.
It’s all about context, and having the reason to tweet. People only engage with stories they are interested in – and even then they need an impetus. Clearly posting Twitter Conversations above the comment section of an article or post is a clear call to action, encouraging the average or potential user to join Twitter, tweet, and interact.
Twitter is the home of some of the Internet’s most incredible exchanges – so how do we engage non-users, or those who are just-barely involved?
With Twitter Conversations, Twitter could finally conquer its most powerful asset — following and discussing the latest news. It could drive thousands of new impressions per article, and yes, it could incorporate promoted tweets.
If Twitter wants to make its next big move, it should bring people in and encourage them to consume and create outside of its current private bubble.
Image Credit: http://szolkin.blogspot.co.il/
