Twitter is all over the news after its big misses in Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Revenue. While this is not a good sign for Twitter, does it really need a new CEO and a revamp of their leadership? In todays article on Stratechery, Ben Thompson outlines his case for new leadership in the ranks, and I don't disagree with his sentiments.
TWITTER’S FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM
Twitter’s fundamental problem is that their active user growth is simply too small given their current size. Twitter yesterday reported the service had 302 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), an increase of only 18% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter (and the company said the current quarter would be worse!). This is a fraction of Facebook, half of Facebook Messenger, fewer than Instagram and not that much bigger than SnapChat; presuming the latter service passes Twitter later this year, Twitter will be only the 5th most popular U.S.-based social networking service looking to monetize through advertising. This distinction — which excludes WhatsApp, at least for now — is a critical one, because the issue with advertisers is most don’t have the time or ability to work with multiple services; it’s likely most digital advertising spending (which I believe is set to expand greatly) will be consolidated onto the biggest networks (along with Google’s properties), with Facebook taking the lion’s share. Were that to happen, it’s easy to see Twitter as the odd network out.2
302 million MAU's is a lot of people, yet it's too small for advertising? I agree with Thompson here. Even though I have said before Twitter has enough users to monetize efficiently, they are being dominated by other networks when it comes to size and reach for advertisers. Without the reach, advertisers will not use Twitter in their bag of tricks, they will opt for the platforms that give them the most return for their time and money.
This is where I believe the argument for new leadership is warranted. They need the reach because they are trying to play the same game as all of the other social networks. The game is garner the most active users and create the reach that advertisers will jump all over. What if that is not the game Twitter should be playing? When in a position of weakness, which Twitter clearly seems to be in at this point, the strategy has to change. By following the lead of Facebook and the like, Twitter can't win. Facebook will always win in this scenario. Facebook as the leader can follow competitors, because they are the biggest. Facebook's competition has to find a different strategy to make the most profit in the social arena.
Instead, Twitter should redouble its efforts to acquire new users even as it redefines what Twitter the company is all about. I wrote about this in What Twitter Might Have Been:
Alternatively, Twitter could empower third-party developers to build these sorts of applications that feed back information into the Twitter interest graph. An application like Nuzzel, for example, which uses your Twitter graph to create a news app, has much more of a one-way relationship with the social network: Nuzzel is getting all the benefit, and not sending much information back to Twitter. Twitter would be better off retooling their API and developer agreements to ensure they are learning from every application they interact with, and in return sharing their graph along with advertising in the form of their MoPub or Namo Media-derived offerings. The advantage of this approach is that the imagination and ingenuity of a massive developer ecosystem will always be far faster and more innovative than anything any one company can do on its own — just ask Apple.
I really like this strategy. Third party developers are what made Twitter in the first place. The firehose which is Twitter is better served as a platform for news and advertising that any third party can reach into and intake. They just have to intake the advertising to be a part of the program. I use Tweetbot and I don't see a single ad. This should never happen for a company like Twitter. Tweetbot, for the right to make a living off of the Twitter platform, should be required to show me advertising.
My issue with Twitter is the firehose. When you start to follow enough people, it is too hard to keep up with everything you want. Facebook uses their algorithm to eliminate this phenomena, yet it does so in a way that doesn't create a bad experience for the user. In fact, the user experience is greater because over time the user will see what they want as Facebook learns. Third Party apps could do wonders with the firehose. There would be so much innovation with the Twitter platform if Twitter embraced their third party partners. This I believe would triple the MAU's for Twitter as the third party innovations would bring different ways to interact with the Twitter firehose.
Twitter also needs to eliminate partners that don't provide it with as much value as they provide. When Steve Jobs took over he killed many projects and I believe Twitter cannot let other parties use their social graph for nothing in return. There needs to be an ad platform that is established for this right. When a partner uses the social graph, they have to use the Twitter ad platform.
TWITTER’S ABANDONED USERS
The trouble for Twitter is that awareness of the service has long outstripped its usability. And yet, despite the fact that Twitter has struggled with new user growth for years, almost nothing was done to improve the product or on-boarding experience until just the last few months, when the company finally rolled out a new logged-out page meant to entice people with Twitter’s content, as well as an instant timeline that helped people get started. Unfortunately, both efforts seem to be too little too late: Twitter admitted on the earnings call that neither improvement had increased retention.
This isn’t a surprise: Business Insider reported last year that Twitter likely had 697 million abandoned accounts (and that number, presuming it was correct, has certainly grown). The problem is that those 697 million users, having already decided that Twitter isn’t a useful service for them, are much less likely to even experience things like the new logged-out page or instant timeline, even though Twitter @-handles and hashtags continue to be plastered all over TV and the web.
The focus should not be on finding new users to the service. If these numbers above are correct, it is much easier to communicate and bring back these users ten it is to constantly find new users. Any new users at this point would be low margin for Twitter at this point anyway. They are more than likely new to the web, in emerging markets that don't have the income compared to the 697 million users that have already used the platform.
While inactive campaigns are very hard, it is essential to get these inactive users back on the site. Step one is to find out why they abandoned. Is there a common theme from inactive users that can be fixed by Twitter or a third party? Next step is to get the word out on changes. Twitter needs to jump at making changes to accommodate the inactive users and then let the inactive base know. They have the emails from all of these users already, unless they spammed them endlessly and they have unsubscribed. Email is a great tool and Twitter uses it poorly in keeping users active and getting return business.
While I agree with Thompson that these changes aren't impossible to implement, the current team seems to be focusing on making Twitter, Facebook. For that reason alone I would let them go. Twitter should focus on service the customers that it has and providing an ad network that targets users so specifically the returns for advertisers is more compelling than the other networks. Then the MAU problem goes away. Easier said than done I know, but they have all the data and information to do it. Plus they have the platform already built.