Twitter’s Roadmap to World Domination

(I wrote this about a month ago but figure I should post this now with all the Twitter news as of late… I will say Moments is a huge step forward but needs to be organized wayyyyyy better. You’ll see my thoughts from a month ago below)

***Warning: This Article Is Long***

SO

If you have ever met me for more than 5 minutes you probably know a couple things. 1. I love golf 2. I’m obsessed with start-ups, and 3. I love (and am an investor) in Twitter. I believe in Twitter from a product & investment stand point but I think they are missing the boat on a few things. Twitter has the potential to be bigger than Google and so here, in this post, I’m going to outline their roadmap to world domination.

Step 1. Make it easier to find & organize content

Plenty of adults ask me what Twitter is and when I explain it to them, they say yes but what does the product actually look like? Simply put, Twitter is a “news feed” or even more simply, it’s just a scrolling list of 140-character posts by people, brands, and parody accounts. Although this is cool and the millenials are used to a “news feed” there are lots of people who didn’t grow up with the idea that content is simply just a scrolling list.

They grew up with organized news papers and magazines where one can flip to a page and see all relevant content for one subject, or stay on the front page and see everything that is most important (as we would call it today, trending).

Twitter needs to redesign the user interface around a feature they already have built. LISTS. Whether a person organizes their own lists or Twitter does it for them automatically (like apple music or spotify curating playlists in-house, which twitter could do for lists of people to follow), they need to make it easy to see separate news feeds based around subjects. This will make it easier & more efficient to find content you want. Within these subjected lists, users should be able to see all the most popular content in the last few hours as well as break out the content by brand accounts and celebrities or influencers as well as just a timeline list.

They can also get clever with the user interface making something similar to facebook’s “paper” app or a spin-off of flipboard’s UI, but in general Twitter needs to do a better job of organizing & presenting content for its users. Way better than just a list of everyone you follow in order of when it was posted.

Step 2. News

Twitter has become the go-to place for breaking news & general news discovery. As I often explain to people that wonder about my claim of getting more than 80% of my news through Twitter, the platform allows you to not only follow the news outlet itself but also the writers themselves. So you aren’t just getting content in the form of a link to an article, you are getting 140 character commentary and information from various writers in each news outlet you choose to follow.

They have been testing a news button on the bottom of the app for a while, which shows articles & tweets similar to big stories. However, this can be taken so much further. When a news story breaks or when something really big is happening, it would be helpful to see the most relevant content presented to me in more than a list of tweets or a list of tweets with links to longer articles. I wrote an article a while back about combining Circa (a news app that is now dead) with Twitter but essentially, Twitter needs to format a better way to aggregate & organize tweets when events are happening in real time.

****** (New thoughts based on today’s introduction of Moments: Moments are a HUGE improvement and a major step forward for the company. It will be interesting to see how they evolve moments and maybe even roll out a moments platform for people who do not even have twitter accounts… I could see plenty of people scrolling through this at work on their commute instead of flipping through Business Insider or Buzzfeed. I think going forward they should allow users to choose topics on the top of moments or have Twitter add a a ton of “sub-moments” to the top based around who that user already follows, not just hand curated from Twitter.

The UI is good! I like it very much, but I feel they ripped off Snapchat a bit. The focus is on video and pictures more than text which is fine, but after every few pictures in a moment, there should be an article where one can scroll down and read, then continue on looking at videos and pictures. This way people who like pictures can skip the old school style article format and the ones who want more detail get a healthy mix of old and new. Regardless the pictures and videos are great with the short tweets because as the world’s attention spans shrink; the world will flock to services that shorten content. Hence why Buzzfeed rose to power so quickly, because of lists…) ******

Step 3. Brand Partnerships & Pages

So this is all wonderful and peachy… All of these features would increase user engagement a ton and make the user experience exponentially better. Now it is time to think about new user on-boarding. Twitter needs to completely redesign the brand pages. Instead of scrolling through a list of tweets from a brand, imagine if Twitter partnered with the NFL to customize each team’s page. You could have a stream that shows recent tweets yes, but you could also have a separate part that shows touchdown videos, and a horizontal feed of jerseys to buy, and a stream of tweets from the players. How Twitter or any major sports league has not done this so far is beyond me. It would be a one stop shop to digest content form your favorite team and provide ample marketing and merchandising opportunities.

It goes far beyond sports though, imagine Michael Kors’ custom page. A stream of their most recent tweets on the left, a box in the top right with a slide show of pictures from a recent fashion show. Below that would be a box displaying their most recent commercial ad and below that a picture of 3 new watched for the fall that allows users to vote for their favorite and win a free watch! The possibilities are endless… Seriously… This would be a HUGE source of revenue for Twitter, well beyond a buy button in a tweet.

Step 4. Periscope & Vine

Twitter has bought two social video start-ups before they launched. Vine, an app that allows users to post 6 second videos, has grown into a large community of over 40 million users. Periscope, which launched at the beginning of 2015, allows users to live stream video from their phone to anyone around the world and has quickly grown to over 15 million users. Vine has grown to such a large audience partly because it is so easy to discover new and interesting content on the platform. This is something majorly lacking on Periscope and when periscope creates their version of the “search” page on Vine, users will have 10 times a better experience and engagement metrics will shoot through the roof.

Separately, Twitter needs to do a better job integrating content from both of these platforms into the actual Twitter app. Lots of people post commentary on social, political, and sports news on both platforms so why not show relevant Periscopes and Vines on the Twitter app when searching for Tweets about a specific topic. This will bring major exposure to the other platforms while increasing user engagement in the actual Twitter app because visual content is much more engaging than text content.

For example, I was watching the NBA finals at a bar in New York City when I got a push notification from Periscope from someone I followed who was in the Arena and live broadcasting the Warriors dance team during a commercial break. If Twitter featured that live stream on the NBA Finals page while everyone was reading tweets on the page during the break, it would increase the exposure to Persicope, provide even more engaging content to the Twitter user, and provide another advertising opportunity for Periscope.

Step 5. Live events

The most active times for Twitter are always during big live events like the Super Bowl, Grammy’s, and season finales of popular TV shows. Recently, starting with the NBA finals, Twitter made certain hashtag feeds into engaging pages displaying the score of the game along with recent tweets from fans, influential broadcasters, & celebrities, but this can be taken so much further.

When a live sporting event is happening, not just the playoffs, I should be able to find the game page by tapping on the team’s page or any tweet talking about the game and see the score, the last play, tweets from broadcaster’s & celebrities about it as well as fan tweets. People are already scrolling their feed while watching a game but why should I see tweets about my friend getting an A on her test when I could be seeing more content I haven’t discovered about the game OR even ads targeted towards me.

Yes, this is the most important part about step 4, if you get a few thousand people for a regular game, or a few million people for the super bowl, on a dedicated page, you can target ads to that specific audience. This will be a huge new source of revenue for Twitter.

Step 6. Analytics

I have talked a lot about making content more easily accessible and organized for the consumers but there are a few things Twitter should do for the heavy content creators. A couple years back they rolled out Twitter analytics which is a little button on the bottom right of all your tweets that show how much engagement and views the tweet got. Twitter should expand this into its own stand alone social media analytics platform.

A $5 a month service that shows content creators how many people saw each tweet, how much engagement it got, what is the best time to post, which tweets are doing better, who are their most engaged followers, tips & tricks about how to grow engagement, the ability to schedule posts among all the apps in the Twitter ecosystem & much much more. This will be an added source of revenue for Twitter and a major help to the heavy content creators.

Step 7. DM

Recently Twitter lifted the character limit on direct messages to other users. I don’t know specific numbers but I have seen a large increase in messages among my friends so I’m sure there has been some level of increase, even if it’s minuscule. This direct message feature has huge potential for Twitter in a world dominated by a few direct messaging apps. How ever, despite iMessage, Facebook Messenger, & What’s App controlling most of the direct messaging market, Twitter DM plays in a little different market. Twitter DM is not about messaging your close friends or family but rather messaging people who you have met through Twitter. It is a different type of communication for a different type of contact.

For example, if you open up the DM page in my twitter app, the last 4 people I have communicated with through this feature are all people I met on twitter, only one of which I have actually met in person. How ever, I still talk to all of them a couple times a week. Lots of people think Twitter is mostly about pushing out content but this is a misconception. Twitter is just as much about interacting with people, brands, and influencers, as it is pushing out and digesting content.

To capitalize on this, Twitter should build a stand alone DM messenger app. No hear me out. Instagram recently introduced a right arrow at the bottom of every picture allowing you to send a picture directly to someone in a private chat. Twitter needs to build a similar button to be able to easily share tweets with people with out having it show up on your profile timeline page. Before I wrote this, my friend sent me an iMessage that said, “did you see Tiger Wood’s tweet??” If twitter allowed users to seamlessly share tweets privately with each other and then have a follow-up conversation on the twitter platform, this would increase engagement and time spent on the twitter platform hugely.

Also, Twitter could build a discovery feature into messenger that encourages you to strike up conversation with people who tweet about things similar to what you tweet about. For example, if someone I have never heard of or interacted with on the platform tweets about the new iPhone & so do I, Twitter can encourage us to strike up a conversation about it, which might lead to a budding new friendship or a potential business partnership. SO MUCH POTENTIAL because it’s a different kind of connection.

Step 8. Search

At this point, the only thing left to do is go after Google. Because Twitter would be with out a doubt the largest crowd sourced platform for (important) content, it would only make sense to make a full fledged search engine. I say important because Facebook will always rule supreme over the creation of personal, friendly content but Twitter will dominate news and brand content.

So yes, the ability to search for the Pope, get some news articles on him, a couple options for websites about him (like Google would give you), but also some of the most popular tweets ever said about him, some recent tweets about him, the most popular accounts to follow for news on the Pope… Type in anything and this twitter search engine would come up with all this. The most amount of information on ANY given subject, at the tip of your fingers. It could even find the most recent Periscope video or even a live streaming one of the Pope at that very moment…

Step 9. World Domination

Step 10. Twitter Wins