Twitter Is A Platform In Search Of A Purpose

I joined Twitter sometime in 2007, mostly because a bunch of my friends had started using it during SXSW that year and kept talking it up. 

Back then we used Twitter the way my kids use group text messages —we’d comment on basketball games, use it to find each other at industry events, even ask for hotel and restaurant recommendations. 

It had, in those early days, never dawned on us that actual strangers would someday start following us and/or that they would want to read our tweets. 

Around that time, friends from outside the tech-media Bubble became aware of Twitter and started to sign up. 

And by and large they hated it.

“Hate” may be too strong a word. 

Mostly, they just didn’t see the point.

They’d sign on and look for people they knew, and then realize there weren’t any.

So they’d start following some actors or musicians or journalists that they liked.

Only no one ever followed them back.

Nor did anyone ever respond to their comments. 

Even when they were clever. Even when they felt brave enough to actually leave a comment.

It got very boring, very quickly.

And so they left. 

Or at least stopped trying to use it as anything other than a breaking news feed they looked at a couple of times a week.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that “why am I here” experience these past few weeks as I’ve tried to navigate BlueSky, Jack Dorsey’s Elon-less alterna-Twitter.

It was, when I arrived in early April, mostly engineers sharing their latest Midjourney creations. It has since seen an influx of Extremely Online Twitter expats obsessing about Nazis and Elon. 

Either way, I still don’t know anyone, and it feels both isolating and pointless.

But that is not the point I am trying to make.

Twitter is the only major social media platform that requires people to post publicly. This is not something most people feel comfortable with. 

In fact, they are highly uncomfortable doing so. And tend to regard people who don’t feel that same hesitation as highly narcissistic.

But again, that is not the point.

The point is that there’s never been much incentive to be on Twitter. At least not for the majority of the population. Which is why the platform has always struggled with growth.

Yes there are a lot of journalists and activists on there. But that is about it. 

There are not a lot of anything else. No demo or affinity group where you can say “oh, they are all on Twitter.”

Which makes it hard for advertisers to justify spending money.

Which makes it hard for people to ever feel at home there. To feel like they belong.

You see, most people are observers and are happy being observers.

This is the appeal of TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. You can just sit back and watch and that is enough. You can like or comment on something but your comments are secondary to the actual content, whereas on Twitter they have equal weight. 

So then the question is why? Why has Twitter managed to hang on for sixteen years?

It has, for me, been a good place to promote TVREV, but for those users with nothing to promote (i.e. most of them) it serves as a news feed of sorts with the “What’s Happening” tab on the right cueing them in on any breaking news and reminding them that say, the Celtics are playing the Heat in Game 3 again tonight and that it is Mr. T’s birthday.

This news feed is Twitter’s strength: news often breaks first on Twitter and the journalists who congregate there will reference it in their subsequent reporting, meaning the platform frequently appears to punch well above its weight.

But news is never an easy business and there’s no clear path for monetization. Would enough people pay Twitter for a breaking news feed? Would advertisers want to be associated with it?

It’s tricky. 

For a number of reasons. 

Let’s start with the thing nobody wants to say out loud, which is that Twitter’s user numbers have long been assumed to be overinflated.

There’s the fact that many people maintain multiple accounts. Not due to some nefarious plot, but because it was something that was encouraged early on: one account for you, one for your business, one for your hobby. And there has not, to my knowledge, been an accounting of these duplicate accounts, which is likely to impact that monthly average user stat.

And that’s before you get to the bots and the porn and the spam accounts.

So there’s that and now there’s the possibility that Twitter wants to get into broadcasting, specifically with Tucker Carlson, though they could conceivably add others, maybe even encouraging the more prominent posters to create short-form, TikTok-like takes on the news.

Carlson’s presumed toxicity to advertisers and many users aside, there are other issues with video. 

One is that Twitter’s secret sauce is its value as a real time news service. Video, even short, quick-hit video, still takes time to produce, which then eliminates the real-time advantage.

The other is format. 

Given that almost half of all YouTube videos are now watched on an actual TV set, would people watch Twitter on TV and is there a market for a Twitter TV app?

There might be, but it would need to solve an actual consumer need while appealing to a broader swath of the audience, one that advertisers felt comfortable with. Which, given the drama surrounding Elon Musk, may take some serious fence mending.

Advertisers were skeptical of Twitter long before Musk took over because they were skeptical of audience sizes and skeptical of brand suitability. Twitter on TV might solve the audience size thing by providing better measurement stats, but brand suitability around breaking news is a tricky one.

Unless, of course, Twitter doubles down on celebrities and sports figures rather than news anchors and journalists, but again, that’s a big reach, especially now that those figures, along with their younger audiences, have largely relocated to TikTok.

Which still leaves Twitter with its real problem, which is what is its value prop?

What can it offer that consumers aren’t finding anywhere else, something that maintains a degree of interactivity, yet allows it to attract the sort of sizable user base that advertisers are looking for. All without alienating them on brand suitability issues.

It’s quite a juggling act and I’m glad I’m not the one trying to keep all those balls in motion.