Dorsey’s Twitter Challenges And Changes
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has seen his fair share of challenges – read more for the Twitter changes being presented as solutions.
Though it’s a mainstay on the Silicon Valley tech scene, Twitter has had many problems for quite some time now. With the return of one of its original founders, Jack Dorsey, as CEO last year, many insiders thought that he would bring the company back on stable footing so it could go about garnering the mass usership it needs to stay relevant in the competitive social media ecosystem.
Going Down?
With so much tumult, a declining stock price, slowing user growth, and a slew of top executives leaving the company altogether, Dorsey has a big task on his hands. Ten months into his reign and things haven’t changed quite enough to quell the nerves of shareholders and to stop predictions of the company’s demise. In addition, serious concerns over online abuse and safety still remain, and many critics say that the company has not done enough to make the service a safe space for its users, especially women.
Getting Back To Basics
It’s important to remember what Twitter was originally intended to be because it helps one understand why it’s gone off course. In the words of Jack Dorsey himself, speaking to Bloomberg: “In the past, when people heard about Twitter, they assumed that the way to use it was you had to tweet about something. I think more and more people are seeing it as, “I can just see what’s happening in the world. I can see what’s happening about any event.” And the faster we make it for people to realize that, we grow this amazing daily audience around any particular event around the globe.”
So Twitter is about simultaneous and live connection around a particular event via words, pictures and images. The network thrives around current events like elections and breaking global news stories. So in order to see a spike in usership, Twitter needs to get more people involved in this very simple concept. The fact that 2016 is an election year may help with that, as Dorsey noted in the same interview that “The election year has always been good to us: 2008 was a massive, massive year for us, and this is a massive year for us. People can get into it immediately and see commentary that they care about. They make a connection with someone they didn’t know before or they weren’t expecting to meet.”
On The Horizon
Given that expanding usership is the primary goal, one might think that Twitter would be rolling out new features that are more entry level, rather than refining the experience for heavy users. That’s why some pundits were confused when the company announced its latest spate of features, as they seemed much more geared to the latter than the former.
As Quartz wrote in response to the new features: “It seems curious that the company’s latest project is a standalone app for the most hardcore of its users. As its name suggests, Twitter Engage gives the platform’s power users a set of tools to monitor tweet analytics, identify opportunities to increase engagement, and view mentions and follows from other influentials.”
Other changes made in the most recent round of updates is to increase the time length of videos from 30 seconds to 140, and promoting more integration with Vine by allowing users to upload videos. There has also been a relaxing of Twitter’s 140 character limit—which has always been a hallmark of the service—by not including links and photos in the total count. Again, while this is a significant change to existing users, it’s not necessarily something that might draw in a new user. If the company wants to really address its long-term viability, it will need to make changes that do that rather quickly.