Last week I was walking to work, listening to music, and thinking to myself. I started thinking about Twitter and the hurdles they face over the next few years. I’ve written before about changes Twitter should make to the onboarding process and how this is the critical weak point. This is the reason why active users are down, and while I think MAU is the wrong way to value Twitter as a company, it does speak to the complexity of Twitter as a product for mainstream usage.
Twitter is not the easiest to grasp on the creation and engagement side (who cares what I have to say, what’s a retweet, the difference between an at reply, at mention, etc). Twitter isn’t that much better on the consumption side (building your follower list, tweaking it, multiple different experiences across web and mobile, etc). It isn’t rocket science but it is not dummy proof. There is education needed, always troublesome for consumer products.
This is also why Facebook is so stupid simple. You add friends and then your feed basically auto-populates - no need to think or do anything. A byproduct of this is why Facebook needs to curate your feed because there is a lot of noise.
Building your own feed is what makes Twitter the amazing product that it is, but getting regular people to build and maintain a feed is not easy and puts Twitter between a rock and a hard place.
The best way I’ve heard someone describe Twitter’s problem is comparing it to buying a TV with Time Warner cable. Imagine instead of coming with all the channels preset, you had to program each channel yourself.
Your friends keep telling you how amazing Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, The Walking Dead and other shows are. But damn, I need to program each channel? Myself? Ugh.
If the content is good lots of people will do it but at a certain point some people (no matter how amazing GOT is) will not take the time to program the channel on their TV. That is Twitter in a nutshell - you have to put in the time to make it work. It seems like 300 million have so far but we are at a point where the rest either don’t have the patience or wherewithal to do it themselves.
Now, many others have suggested similar things and while Twitter has implemented some changes it seems to have little effect so far.
The real issue here is having a new user get the value from Twitter that I (and others that have spent 5+ years actively tweaking their feed) get.
I get so so so so much value from using Twitter. Every single day. For me, the value I get ranges from information and knowledge about things I find important or interesting, like technology, sports, pop culture, world news, to other things like answers to questions, job opportunities (don’t need that right now but helps me get jobs for others), connecting to like-minded individuals, and more.
And that’s the beauty of Twitter. If you learn to wield it correctly you can get so much value. And that’s what Twitter needs to give new users - more than just a pre-loaded feed of generic celebrities and established news accounts. Twitter needs to figure out how to give a new user some amount of comparable value to a long-time user who has finely tuned who they follow.
I’m still not 100% sure how they can do this (but something about popular Twitter Lists could be a starting point). I’ll keep thinking about it (and eventually write something if something comes to me). But if they think about the problem in the lenses of “value” one gets from Twitter - I think the solution is a different one from auto-following generic celebrities and popular news outlets.
And just to this point - I saw this tweet in my feed last night. Joel is 100% right.
Twitter thinks the best thing it has to offer me is Kylie Jenner pic.twitter.com/PEfgz6I3QY
— Joel Andren (@joelandren)
December 3, 2015