Five Ways to ‘Fix’ Twitter

Twitter Has a Problem

With Twitter experiencing flat user growth in recent earnings reports and losing 2 million active users, the company is left without a backup plan and few ideas as to how to gain back users. What needs to be fixed and how can get back on track?  Traditional marketing theory would hold that the company needs to work from its core competencies, that is, what makes it unique, and build from there. 

What the Students Think is Wrong

I asked my undergraduate and graduate students in digital marketing and social media at St. Edward’s University this past semester what we can do to fix the problem.  We started with a basic strategy discussion.  What makes Twitter unique? Twitter is a short-format platform or microblog, limited to 140 characters.  However, that limitation is a technical characteristic that can easily be imitated on another platform.

What Twitter has going for it its customer base and what their interests are.  For example, Lady Gaga has over 60 million Twitter followers and carefully manages interactions with her fan base of power users.  Companies should think like Lady Gaga and find out where their best promoters reside on Twitter.  Twitter should also make better use of its most influential “Tweeters” because they hold the key to the marketplace and better monetization of the platform.

What Twitter is known for is trending news, another trend that is led by its customer base.  News reports from the Arab Spring to the Boston Marathon bombings to the engagement of Prince William have ‘broken’ on Twitter.  However, if Twitter is not careful, they could lose this advantage. The market for those who seek trending news will go to other social media outlets.  Instagram and Snapchat are growing more quickly and are more visually-oriented than Twitter.

 Another issue that we have noted is that Twitter is one of the only, if not THE only platform where one has to use another platform to understand the tool!  Twitter spawned Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and other tools to manage the stream of news events.  Even Twitter analytics themselves are separate from the platform. The events scroll past endlessly and good Twitter users post the same content multiple times as they try to capture the viewers’ attention.  The addition of ‘’while you were away: feature is in recognition of this problem. 

Our Suggestions

These are the tactical ideas that the students came up with to help implement the strategic platforms:

1. Describe trending hashtags: Twitter displays what hashtags are trending at the moment on the left side of the news feed. Following Facebook’s example, it would be useful to have descriptions under the trending hashtags so the interested user can click read more related tweets of or to find out more about the topic. A student brought up #PSGCHE as an example. He did not know at all what that meant and why it was trending. He clicked on it to see what it stood for and discovered it was about the soccer match of PSG vs. Chelsea. He had no interest in soccer but thought if the trending hashtags had descriptions, he would have clicked on one that would of been more to his interest.
2. Leverage professionals : According to the Huffington Post,2 celebrities are the 1% of Twitter users while the 99% of users are the ones following them. Businesses use Twitter to engage with their customers more closely than any other social media site or media method. A student suggested that there should be a more professional aspect of Twitter so professionals can engage more with Twitter users. There should be more sides to Twitter other than entertainment and celebrity gossip. While many business professionals follow experts on Twitter, we thought that Twitter had not done that much to highlight them on the platform.
3. Eradicate robots and spam: There have been cases when “twitterbots” spread false information, tweet out spam, catfish people, take over accounts, and boost up the number of followers on someone’s account.These are not real users, but the students think that they are a real nuisance. Students suggested that these bots must be deleted and filtered out on Twitter’s system to make it a more secure network for people. Users get discouraged when there are false users, false information, and too many notifications out on their news feed. It can also lead to distrust, which could be a reason why users have begun to stop using Twitter.
4. Make the platform more user-friendly: We discussed how does one begin to use Twitter?  It is estimated that close to half of the people with an account do not use the platform. Some people don’t continue using Twitter because they don’t understand how to use it to its potential.4 Making Twitter more user-friendly will encourage current users and new users to get on the social media platform. Changing how the layout of the site is formatted to enhance the most used tasks on the platform will improve user experiences on Twitter.
5. Get back to basics: Again, we would suggest that the company think about what makes it unique and focus on that.  This is a platform based, more than any others on its customers.  Customers have defined Twitter by using it as they see fit, including the invention of the hashtag.  Getting back to the customer and their needs and letting them define the platform gives Twitter the best chance of success.  

With Twitter losses of $90.2 million, let’s hope that they will make major changes soon to save their platform. Hopefully, they can take some of the users’ and students’ advice on what changes they would like to be made to fix Twitter.  The decision to change what counts as a character for a Tweet to exclude media attachments and @names is a beginning, but more needs to be done to rejuvenate the stalled platform.  What ideas do you have?

1.Koh, Yoree (2016, Februrary 11), “Twitter Woes Mount as Growth Stalls--- For the first time, social media firm fails to show any user gains; shares fall to new lows”, The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from http://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-posts-loss-amid-user-growth-concerns-1455140113.

1. Hernandez, Daniela (2015, September 15), “Why can’t Twitter kill its bots?”, Fusion. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from http://fusion.net/story/195901/twitter-bots-spam-detection/.
2. Pickering, Ben (2013, November 3), “10 Types of Twitter Users”, The Huffington Post. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-pickering/types-of-twitter-users_b_4208702.html.
3. Dunne, Brendan (2012, September 28), “Which social networks are more user friendly, Twitter or Facebook?”, Quora. Retrieved March 3, 2016 from https://www.quora.com/Which-social-networks-are-more-user-friendly-Twitter-or-Facebook.