User numbers have been a sore spot for Twitter since it went public in November of last year. The company has seen its stock repeatedly slammed for slowing growth. CEO Dick Costolo has tried to paint it as something temporary, and has pledged to make the reversal of the trend one of the company's top priorities.
So where to begin? The sign up page seems like a good place.
Twitter has just updated the sign-up process on its homepage for the first time in three years, according to a Tweet put out by Christian Oestlien, Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, on Friday. The process, he said, took months to complete.
After months of effort, Twitter's website has a new sign-up flow. Our first major update in 3 years. Congrats team! pic.twitter.com/YP3USo4WVz
— Christian Oestlien (@christianism) August 29, 2014
So what exactly is new here?
First, while Twitter used to kick off the sign-up process by suggesting accounts that the user might want to follow from different genres, like music and sports, now it actually asks what those users are interested in, according to the Wall Street Journal. That can be anything from fashion to photography to news.
Then, when it has a better idea of what the user will want to to actually see, it will make suggestions.
Also, it no longer just shows new users the profile photos of those accounts it is suggesting, but also a sample tweet, so the user has a clearer idea of whether or not they want to follow that account.
In addition, user used to have to select which accounts they wanted to follow, but now Twitter makes its suggestion and the user has to deselect the ones they don’t want to follow.
Overall, the new layout is cleaner and the ability to see a suggested account’s sample tweet before committing to follow them is nice. But Twitter is basing a lot on its suggestions – if the first round of suggestions aren’t relevant or helpful, it doesn’t appear to replace them with further suggestions. Although, once signed up, Twitter does frequently suggest other accounts to follow based on who you’ve previously followed, what you’ve tweeted or search history.
What this is designed to do is to make the process of signing up cleaner, easier and more enticing.
Twitter user numbers
While Twitter had been slammed for its user numbers, recently it did show some signs of turn around in that department.
In the second quarter of 2014, the company saw its average monthly active users (MAUs) grow 24% year to year, and 6% quarter to quarter, to reach 271 million. Mobile MAUs increased 29% year to year, and 7% quarter to quarter, to 211 million. Mobile MAUs represented 78% of the company's total MAUs.
It was able to beat expectations, as analysts had expected MAUs to grow at 21%.
But problems still loom: according to a report from eMarketer in May, Twitter is expected to see its user numbers grow by 24.4%, down from 30.4% last year.
And it only gets worse from there: while the company will have roughly 400 million users by 2018, by that point the company's growth will have slowed to a mere 10.7%. That means that, including this year, Twitter has five years left of double digit before it really started to peter out. In other words, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for the company will ever be able to match Facebook's 1.25 billion active users. In fact, it will be lucky to get half of that.
In other words, Twitter needs to do everything it can to get new users onto the site. Making the sign-up process better is a good first step, but Twitter needs to do a lot more.
VatorNews has reached out to Twitter for more information, and we will update if we learn more.
(Image source: Twitter.com)
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Startup/Business
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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