#Twitter —How Twitter is losing its mojo and its purpose to spam.
“Twitter collapses 18% in the wake of lackluster revenue user growth” — not the headline which Twitter deserves. a company with $436 million quarter revenues and 302 million active users. Various sites attribute the drop to missing guidance values and not so encouraging user base growth. Twitter also earns an approximate 90% of its revenues from mobile advertising. ( A combination to worry is when the user base is not growing steep and mobile Ads are contributing 90% of the total revenue).
What is Twitter suited for? — A special platform where people can speak their minds, tell their stories and create meaningful conversations which others have agreed to listen to. Twitter has the advantage of being a First mover ( Calamity, breaking news etc), Exclusivity ( opinions of a celeb, popular individual, mind speak) and to be a reliable Communication channel ( company accounts, brand marketing accounts, sales promotions accounts). In twitter, everyone effectively has the potential to be a content creator and followers are all ears to what one has to say. An explosion in usage for twitter will arise only when the key words“ meaningful” “ minds” and “ stories” are practiced by a good no. of users. the above is what i would refer as Twitter relevant content which the platform takes advantage of through exclusivity, first mover or communication to create a successful conversation. Loads of content generated in twitter with some being original and a majority being shared ( re-tweets) in the form of existing available content consumable in other media jeopardizes the exclusivity factor. Twitter is currently at a point where the relevant content being generated is outpaced rapidly in an ocean of “irrelevant and also ran content” available in other media.
As a Product marketer and a twitter user for the last 6 years, here are my thoughts about how twitter is being used and how can the engagement go up. Being a mobile based product, twitter cannot have any reason to not be the largest used social app for conversations. In the below, I have roughly summed up Twitter’s work flow to explain each of the process needed to create a meaningful conversation
Users — → Activation — →Engagement — ->Meaningful Conversations
A. Users — At 302 Million with deceleration in new users every quarter, Twitter can add new apps integrated to its platform ( i.e Periscope ) or buy and integrate any of the existing apps that can synchronize meaningfully in creating a genuine conversation. Users from existing app get ported to twitter and continue interaction from where they left off in the previous app. integration of apps also to acquire new users from across platforms and increase in content generation from the existing users. In an organic way, new users continue to see twitter handles as source of essential information across screens and opt to participate in content at some point of time. Taking cues from the Whats-app group concept, Twitter can introduce groups where users can bunch their followers with a “small word /digit” group nomenclature i.e groups — C2 etc. so it is easy to tag them in a group tweet and any group messages will pop up in the followers phone soliciting a response if the primary user has asked for. this enables referencing, conversation and soliciting a response instantaneously. Twitter acts like a chat application enabling a group chat in the face of relevant content which people would want to share with a group of friends or family in twitter immediately. an active group or tribe thereby solicits new accounts into the platform thereby paving way for activation and meaningful interactions
b. Engagement: 302 Million Users with 500 Million tweets a day. If we are to assume Pareto principal to figure out how many individuals are creating content and also factoring bot accounts/ irrelevant accounts which propagate non relevant content, the math would look approximately like this ; *10% of all accounts would contribute around *90% of tweets and further removing non relevant accounts would mean around *3–4% contributing around *15–20% of relevant tweets. (These are made-up stats on how a randomly distributed curve with lots of noise will behave. strictly and purely hypothetical. Agreed that every system has the similar split of users and they too have monetization issues, but Twitter with a core ideology of sharing ideas instantaneously without barrier is the most impacted among them). Essentially the system is *20% relevant on a total sum of tweets and re-tweets by its users. A 302 Million user base monthly therefore is creating relevant content by a factor of *10 every month, i.e average relevant tweets per active user in a month is 10. this is a very low number for the system to positively re-reinforce itself and grow. now if we assume disproportions within individuals who create content( since all individuals generating relevant content cannot do so at the same rate and all users do not follow the majority of relevant users), we are talking about a further disproportionate allocation of content creation and consumption among people. you should take notice why there is a vast disparity in followers, People like celebrities and sportsperson have followers in millions and immediately the next set of users who generate content are in few hundreds or thousands. the gap is asymmetric and explains as to why very few celebs are very popular THROUGH twitter and the majority aren’t. the fact is the overlap between relevant users, relevant tweets and their role to influence a non-relevant/ passive user to start using is very minimal. so a vast majority of people just re-tweet good content when they come across once in a while & with no original individual content being created but most people are more likely to re-tweet non relevant content most of the time. More noise and hence destruction of platform.
The more one pays attention to the engagement model while filtering out all the noises indicates that
a. Qualitatively the total volume of relevant tweets generated in a day today is very less to monetize a model that was built to create meaningful conversations.
b. Quantitatively 302 Million users would need at-least a 10 fold growth in daily tweets for twitter to monetize the brands. and with increase in user base post the early adopter phase, the level of noise added to the system will grow faster than the relevant content to a point where it actually starts diminishing in the fight for timeline space. i.e Imagine a scenario with 100 random followers on the first and 200 on the third day (with 100 from the first), you are more likely to miss a tweet from relevant users from the first day group on your third day unless the 100 users added have the same relevance.
The above concept is similar to an inbox, where mails are sorted in different groups and we always know where to look for essential information. Twitter can assume such a sorting mechanism to ensure more relevant content is being seen than noise through groups or filters and prioritizing such messages to be shown as a sub-timeline. At this rate, Twitter’s engagement is totally an analytical study and if they are to publish a report, that might present a gaping hole on the intended purpose of the platform and its usage.
c. Meaningful conversations : are a function of healthy platforms with an conducive environment and less distraction. At present, the no. of meaningful conversations in twitter is far lesser in proportion to what its majority users are doing. Twitter is being taken over by bot accounts, representative accounts and other non-individual accounts which tweet the most irrelevant of spam content in a systematic manner taking the life pulse of individual tweets out of the system. this is not a place which is very easy for new users to understand why it is necessarily useful for them. once they get along to consume spam, they are least likely to contribute to the platform positively.
Twitter is primarily driven through User generated content. the entire platform and the modifications have come from users. the core content seems to be moving away from creating 140 character original/primary tweets to sharing already available information available on the web. if the next set of people from the majority are to use this platform positively, they need to experience the exclusivity, first to information, sharing of relevant content and having meaningful conversations first before they can actively participate. if the platform is only about re-tweets and sharing existing content, new users would not find this attractive to try this.
Breaking down their Mission statement in a dysfunctional manner : Twitter users have the power that twitter has not made them understand, people share way too much junk in proportion to ideas and through junk, the idea of instantaneous is lost. the noise is the barrier which twitter has not been able to control or block.
*The Nos. are purely hypothetical and stems from my work/interest in large customer portfolios and behavior of random data sets.
Reference for the company figs : http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/twitter-collapses-18-in-wake-of-lackluster-q1-revenue-user-growth/#.fq56ou:THKt
