In the past week, I hardly found a blog that did not talk about Twitter’s IPO filing, and their thoughts on how the micro-blogging social network would perform in the IPO. While I am personally excited about Twitter’s IPO filing, I am still concerned about the issues Twitter has right now.
Over the past week, I’ve been thinking about the reasons why Twitter would make it big, and why Twitter might not make it big after going public. As far as I remember, Twitter has been the only social network that has been struggling to inject some revenue model into their business. Of course, they tried to push ads in the stream, and the company is still trying to streamline the way developers use their APIs. But for some reason, I think they’ve not been finding a concrete revenue model that would make them sustain in the market, like Facebook.
There were also a lot of articles which spoke about how ads in Twitter stream will kill the company and how Twitter IPO might be a huge flop if they’re not getting it right. I agree to some of their points, but before anyone could invest in the company, they might look for the holes that Twitter is yet to fix.
Growing up – Really Fast
Twitter is huge. I love the fact that I met some of my friends via Twitter. It’s powerful, to-the-point and engaging. But then, this has been the case with Twitter ever since it launched. Twitter is something which is completely different. As AllThingsD reported, it has a growth problem. The company, is yet to come up with an idea to engage people of a different age group or make it more usable than it is currently. I can’t explain Twitter to my uncle or younger cousin brother, but I can easily make them use Facebook instead.
Twitter has been reporting the growth in the user base every since it launched. Until last December, Twitter had over 200 million active users using their service, and the company is expected to add about 260 million users by this year-end. I love that fact that these numbers are true. But then, are these people on Twitter got something to engage with? At this point, I can see a big NO from the users.
The Twitter Quitters Problem
On the other hand, Twitter has also been facing some issues with its users itself. The social network has developed a new word in the urban dictionary, called the Twitter Quitters. Those who move out of Twitter, since they are not finding the social network engaging. Besides these Twitter Quitters, the company has been facing a huge problem with the spam accounts and the hash-tag spamming issues with a lot of users. Unless Twitter comes out with a way to control all these spam accounts and the hash-tag spamming, the quality of the users and the amount of real-users using the social network is questionable. At this point, I’m not sure how Twitter estimated the number of active users using their service. Did they include all these spam accounts under the active accounts table? We’re still not clear about that.
The Reach – A fundamental definition problem
All these things said, Twitter, is yet to reach the common people, who are comfortable using other social networks like Facebook. Twitter might have a huge user-base right now, but the social network is still not mainstream like Facebook. One root cause, which I think is stopping Twitter from reaching out to common people, again goes back to the point I made earlier. Which is the definition to Twitter as a social network. A lot of people are not clear about why they should use Twitter and they find it really difficult to explain what exactly Twitter is.
For a social network to be super successful and work on a revenue model, this problem is something really huge. All the 240 million users who use Twitter are some of those who understand it well or at least get the point of what they can do with Twitter. But on the other hand, all the revenue generation model would be super good when its on paper. But when it goes live, I think it might make an impact short of what they’d expected. Let it be the ads or some other content that are pushed to the stream, it might not have an impact unless the social network has some really big users base, who understands the social network.
The Features
I’ve been using Twitter for several years now. And right from the day I joined Twitter, till today, I have not seen any huge change in the social network’s features. Of course, the site had a revamp, it became responsive, it works seamlessly on all the devices. I appreciate that. But the regular features, like Search or Hash-tag tracking, they’re yet to get mature. Twitter’s search, for some reason is still naive. I feel that the feature is becoming useless to me off late.
Twitter added some real-time search features and storyboard like features to the Search functionality, I agree. But I’m not sure how many people get the results which they want from these searches on Twitter. I use Twitter everyday. And I keep checking my stream every two hours, but then, the stream and the way the social network engages people, haven’t changed a bit. May be, getting a new head for for growth and strategy will have a huge effect on the company? I am not able to predict.
At this point, what I can think of is, Twitter could come up with a good idea to market itself better. Come out, and explain itself better. And tell people what they really stand for. Tell people what they are really doing and why they love doing that. Tell people why they need Twitter and why they’re missing something out by not using the social network. Ultimately, come up with a better definition of what Twitter is and what they offer.
All along, Twitter is being loved by its users. And I personally love Twitter. But all these things which I talked about above, are going to take a hit on the way the company works when it goes with the IPO. People who are ready to invest in the company would easily identify these flaws. Unless Twitter does something revolutionary, and enhance all of its existing features with something that would engage people and keep them coming back to Twitter, its’ going to be a lottery game, which is not predictable. I’m sure Twitter has analyzed all of these stuff. But then, I’m not sure when the next big move will be for the company.