Saving Twitter - Open letter from a small time shareholder
Constantinos Michailidis
?? Titanium Strength Plastics for 3D Printing & Injection Molding
I bought twitter at $21. (a little transparency goes a long way sometimes)
Saving Twitter
I'm going to speak in absolutes and sound really confident, and that's wonderful, but really this is just me thinking out loud.
Here goes...
If you use stock price as a indicator, Twitter is in trouble.
If you look at user growth as an indicator, Twitter is in trouble.
If you read random tweets...
...Twitter is in trouble.
You might not think so right away, but this last one is the most important.
Quality Content
The quality of content on Twitter overall is pretty bad, and content is king... period. Twitter's focus lately has been on helping the average user find content that is meaningful to them. They're doing this with things like Twitter Moments. Wrong focus. Twitter's focus should be on their power users. Millions of twitter users follow a handful of celebrities. Millions more follow their favorite organizations or news outlets, and millions more follow their favorite labels and brands, bands, and even products.
Focus on the power user. Twitter is Kim Kardashian's bloodline to her fans. Same goes for a thousand other power users and organizations.YouTube's partner program elevated the quality of content on YouTube many times over. I'm not saying a partner program is what's right for Twitter's power users. It might be, but the focus should definitely be on that class of user. A short list of things power users might want from Twitter
- Analytics - this is well along the way
- A share of ad revenue and/or other ways to monetize their Twitter activity directly.
- Excellent instructional support on how best to use Twitter - Think HubSpot's Blog for marketers.
- The ability to customize their Twitter page so that it looks and functions better than their own website. (Twitter has more meaningful data on followers than most websites have on their visitors. This should be very possible to do.)
- The ability to sell, or auction off, a tweet (for product promotion)
- The ability to live stream anytime - Totally do-able with periscope. It should be a native feature. (This is huge, one unique thing about Twitter is how 'live' it is compared to other social networks.)
- The ability to make some live streams private and sell tickets to those streams. Bands could use this as a way to further monetize their shows. Lawyers and Accountants can use this to sell advice and to allow people to test out their services. Random users could run a live game show trivia thing, right on Twitter live.
- The ability to organize followers into segments and groups and to target tweets at those segments and groups. (Essential as soon as people follow you for more than one reason. Also, this can be approached from the other side, but some curation is needed, otherwise the experience becomes overwhelming for all users.)
- The ability to create long form content (I think there's an elegant way to do this, that won't ruin Twitter. The idea is not to simply lift the character limit, that's silly, the character limit should remain at 140 characters, but add embedded long form posts, the same way there are embedded videos, photos, and other forms of content. Long form articles can pop up in an overlay so you can read them right on Twitter, rather than opening a new tab. The same way you can watch the video right on Twitter.)
- Giving limited access to an account (for a personal assistant for example).
- Ways to make Twitter even more live (Tweeting directly from a Canon camera, or having a dedicated 'Tweet an image' shortcut on the home screen of a smartphone, or clicking a voice button and tweeting audio instantly--think of how musicians might engage with their fans differently.)
- Wacky idea: Twitter photo booths. It's a photo booth, you go it, take a bunch of pictures, and then tweet them out over the @Twitter handle (or @TwitterBooth or something) which goes out to a million followers. This is just a wacky idea, the inspiration being, that the internet business that make a presence in the physical world, stands a better chance of making a more significant impact on our lives.
- GoPro and Periscope need a partnership badly. How cool would it be to go live from GoPro onto Twitter?
The point is that Twitter cannot increase the quality of the content on Twitter. It's quite the paradox. Only its users can do that, and specifically its power users. Twitter would be wise to help them do precisely that.
Best of luck to Jack Dorsey and the incredible team at Twitter. I haven't sold a single share. I'm excited to see where Twitter goes next.
Founder of B3 Alliance, Tech & Science Partnerships
8 年Great ideas Costa.. It's really surprising with their size and revenue model #1 still isn't truly functional. There are rampant bugs on their analytics for advertisers. They also have a huge advantage if they pushed more into local/geography (+ #6,11). Learn from some of the mistakes of Foursquare and get live and better check-in capabilities. People could see what's going on right at a location in real time, etc.
Quality Management Systems and Regulatory Affairs Expert Operational Excellence & Team Improvement
8 年AS an investor in this type of business I suggest you adopt a trend mentality and hop on and off investments and be satisfied that you road the trend and made a profit during it's popularity.
Business Consultant, Owner And Corporate Educator
8 年Thanks Costa! In my opinion, the biggest problem with Twitter is that it is a one-way communication platform through which you cannot engage. By the time you respond to a Tweet, someone has sent 40 more on 50 different topics. For that reason, it has been used a lot by people and organisations trying to herald their own agendas, do damage control or simply share some foolish idea. That's a big turn off to serious people with jobs. Apart from using it to check the score or a particular news string, why would a serious user use Twitter? Moreover, in terms of quality, the 140 bit structure does not force the user to develop or even think about the idea he or she is about to send outwards (as your example illustrates). Unlike a blog, the person Tweeting does not have to form a thesis or defend it--which is why so many celebrities and politicians end up apologising when they say something stupid. For all those reasons, I think Twitter is down for the count. It was interesting as we saw the social network bubble expanding, but I think a failure to innovate in many of the ways you have outlined has made them obsolete, like Skype.