Marketing and Product Dev. Failure: Why Twitter Is Crumbling And What They Are Ignoring

Although not a guaranteed sign of collapse, the consecutive departure of four senior executives is usually a good clue to investors and consumers that a company (or its common employee) is looking to change direction.

In the case of Twitter, the quick exit of the heads of engineering, media, product, and Vine is only the tip of the corporate iceberg. There turns out to be a distinguishing characteristic of Twitter history that suggests it will not be fit to survive in the current social media environment: resistance to change.

As marketers of all ages, we can sometimes forget or give too little attention to the values of our most valuable and pertinent “millennial” demographic. They are the reason why there is a plethora of social media platforms that exist, and why most platforms have changed so drastically since their launch. Millennials, the carriers of social justice, the innovators of the future, and the sometimes egotistical phone-grippers are a demographic that lives to seek change. What is the newest thing? What will make what I am doing right now easier?

You can have your own opinion about the unpredictability and indecisiveness of the millennial age group, but most companies catering to that demographic know that they need to have a busy product development team to stay in the game, and stay in the green.  

We see this exemplified well with Facebook, which over the years of its existence has consistently introduced new features to its platform (live video, new post reactions, Facebook Messenger, and so on). Twitter, on the other hand, has barely changed its color scheme, not to mention the fact that users are still limited to 140 characters. The last time we saw this kind of product stagnation was with MySpace, which realized and fixed its mistake, long after the majority of its monthly users moved to Facebook.

Innovative changes to your platform, however small the achievements, are almost always a safe bet for the company on the condition that they work properly, do not violate the privacy of users, and are not discriminatory.  When you pair these changes with a properly vetted marketing plan to add “the wow factor,” your users will keep coming back.

In fact, this relationship between product innovation in social media and user engagement is so definite, that it forms a clear pattern. If we stick with the Facebook comparison, we can see that Facebook stock (NASDAQ, FB) has steadily risen by nearly 100 points since its IPO in 2012, while Twitter stock (NYSE, TWTR) has performed the opposite, with a steady net decrease of over 20 points since its IPO in 2013.

If there is one thing that corporate social media moguls must know, it is this: Millennials are constantly seeking new ways to express themselves.

It will be Twitter’s responsibility to create new ways of expression that are up to par with its many competitors or it will be doomed to social media purgatory.