3 Things Twitter Can do To Make It the Most Popular Social Network
Twitter started with strong roots in minimalism. Getting information fast and succinctly. When it launched in 2006, Jack Dorsey envisioned it as a SMS communication app. Subsequently the character limit was set at 140 characters. Jack’s first real tweet was “inviting coworkers.” That’s not how we use Twitter nowadays. Twitter has becoming a publishing platform for news and opinions rather than friendship status updates. It should start embracing more substantive thoughts. Posting quick status updates such as “Going to NYC” works well for celebrities or people with significant followers, but for their new users this post would be pretty meaningless as they would post this on Facebook. Younger Twitter users are feeling they are lost in the fold, because there is not enough room for them to post interesting thoughts to help them gain followers. At the same time they are yearning to use another social network free from prying eyes of long forgotten classmates and distant relatives.
One of the headways Twitter just implemented to make their feed more engaging was the media preview. Just a few weeks before, a user would have to click on a link to see an image. Now pictures can be seen effortlessly just by scrolling thru the feed. This is a important step towards an more interesting feed for friends but Twitter was at least a year too late, giving up valuable users to competitors such as Tumblr and Instagram. Here are 3 more features Twitter should add to ramp up their user engagement even more.
Native Blogging Container
The most important feature that will greatly improve Twitter’s sharing experience is to have a native blogging integration. I don’t mean Twitter should be a Tumblr clone. The Twitter feed should not display entire blog post, but if a user wants to write a long post she should be it to write it without leaving Twitter and it would tweet out the post’s title. Twitter’s strength is that it has the world’s most influential people with millions of followers eager to soak up their thoughts. By not having it’s own direct blogging integration, Twitter is giving away it’s users to their competitors such as Facebook and Tumblr. In October Uber CEO Travis Kalanick wrote a widely shared post to address some of the service issues surrounding the limo driving company. He chose to post it on his Facebook page. Before posting, Travis had around 5,000 more Twitter followers than Facebook fans. After he posted on his Facebook page, he now has 10,000 more Facebook fans than Twitter. Could Twitter Co-Founder Ev William’s Medium be the reason why Twitter has been straggling on this issue?
Vine, Where is the Follow?
One of Twitter’s most notable acquisition was the fun, short video sharing app Vine. Since going live, it had about a 6 month head start before its photo sharing rival, Instagram launched their video sharing feature. Most of the Vine videos are being discovered from the Twitter feed. However there is no way for to follow interesting Vine accounts from Twitter via the web view. To to follow the user on Vine, a user has to open the Vine smartphone app, search for the video, and hopefully find the account to follow. There was many instances where I would want to follow interested Vine accounts, but the process was just too cumbersome to follow thru. In turn, I almost never open the Vine app, because I don’t follow many interesting people. This lost of long term engagement is a major impediment to building the network effect to compete with Instgram. Many are saying Instagram has beat out Vine. (source). Leaving out the follow button on the web view is especially puzzling for a company that popularized it.
Just A Twee Bit Longer
With reply tweets containing @username and urls, Tweetizens are complaining 140 characters is just not enough. Sometimes companies use Twitter as a customer support channel. It is often challenging to fit essential info such as the order id when tweeting to a service provider. Most of all, it’s ironic that the smartest, most important people in the world have to resort to use preteen abbreviations to get some of their thoughts out. Twitter is neglecting posts that are in between a short status update and a blog. Users should be able to post with a bit more substance and content without making a formal blog entry. It is not to say Twitter should get rid of their character limit. Keeping the tweets short and succinct sometimes makes the tweets fast to read (though cryptic at times). Nevertheless, it could be a bit longer to to around 200 characters to make it easier for people to deliver more thoughts in grammatically competent sentences. The article “Why The Japanese Love Twitter But Not Facebook” points out the main reason Twitter is so popular in Japan is that you can fit a lot with Japanese characters than Roman letters. An Japanese blogger who lives in California tested that 135 characters Japanese sentence is equivalent to 356 characters English sentence. To keep the feed quick the read, it can hide parts of the tweet that are longer than 140 characters. That way readers can move on if the long tweet is not interesting to them.
Twitter’s advantage the app is simple and quick to use. Compared to Facebook, it has a lot less clutter from pseudo friends and spammy apps. If it would just let’s user tweet more expressively, I would guarantee it will grow its active users dangerously close to their 110 billion dollar rival.
