3 Things Twitter Needs to do in Order to Unlock Massive Shareholder Value

Let me start by saying I am a huge fan of Twitter. The social media site isn't for everyone and hasn't seen the explosive user growth of Facebook or other platforms. While it's total registered users are far fewer than Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, it remains a powerful tool. Twitter has become the public forum where world leaders share updates, news breaks most frequently, and you can follow any sporting or cultural event without a TV.

So why is Twitter's market cap today $25 billion and Facebook's a whopping $655 billion? There are a lot of reasons, including Facebook's family of apps (Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) and 3 billion total users across them. Twitter will likely never become the titan Facebook is, but there are still opportunities to unlock huge value for the app that the President of the United States uses dozens if not hundreds of times per day.

1. Add Profile Information and Verify Real Accounts

This immediately fixes two major problems with the platform. The first is that it cleans up the platform from fakes. A 2017 study found that up to 15% of all Twitter accounts could be bots (that's 48 million fakes). Fake accounts spread negativity and harmful misinformation. We don't need to get into all of that in this blog post. The fact is fake users make the Twitter experience for real users much worse. Long story short: A platform filled with so much anger is no fun. A fun platform = more users wanting to stay on for longer.

Adding profile information unlocks Twitter's value in another way - advertiser dollars. As someone who has used Twitter for advertising, I am surprised this hasn't been addressed long ago. You share life events on Facebook. You share vacations, relationship status, career updates, birthdays, "likes", events you are attending and just about everything else you can think of. At most, Twitter might know your birthday and the city you claim to live in (my Twitter location is set to Cloud9). They need to make profile information something people want to share and they need to capture a whole lot more info about you than what you put in your bio (mine says "The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread").

2. Add a Geo Location Sharing Product

Twitter is already behind here. They are a text based platform in an image based world. They have location sharing as an option, but I rarely see it used, because people don't tweet a picture at the coffee shop as much as they post it on their story (another feature that would be good). What about adding a map feature that allows you to scroll around the country and click on Miami to see what people are tweeting about in that area? Imagine breaking news happening in Los Angeles but you're in Boston. Want to get a real pulse on what is happening? What better way than watching the live tweets from the area come in real time. I can imagine a ton of uses for this. Another reason it's good? Geo-based advertising. That's a huge portion of digital ad dollars that Twitter will never see if they don't make a prominent geo-location product.

3. Monetize the News

World leaders and media figures love Twitter. Twitter needs to figure out how to make more money off of this; here is one way they could do it. Prominent figures can pay Twitter to give them the "news reach" which expands their audience on a subscription basis. Similar to Snapchat's news section or Facebook's dedicated news section, Twitter can separate out this channel of "news tweets" to display them in a user's feed even if they don't follow the particular reporter. This would be more curated than the trending tab of Twitter, which can be cheated by users to make irrelevant topics get more exposure.

There are of course other questions these ideas raise and I won't pretend to have the answers for all of them. Twitter has a long way to go. There could be at least 2 more blogs with this same title and 6 completely different ideas that would unlock value in the company. However, the fact that a company that is used daily by the most powerful people in the world is worth a tiny fraction of a platform that you used to poke your middle school crush with is totally crazy.