Recent Shake-Ups With Twitter
Recently there has been a big shake-ups with Twitter with the return of former CEO Jack Dorsey, also CEO of Square. A lot of high-level officials have departed from the company with different reasons for why but one thing is for sure, more changes are coming. Chiefly that of platform changes and the iconic number of characters in a tweet going way up from 140 to possibly as high as 10,000. More on Twitter Character Limits from Recode.
Since brevity has always been the allure of the service, with witty quips, short news bites and links to other resources, a lengthy tweet could dramatically shift how people use the service.
It seems like an obvious move from the side of keeping more eyeballs on the Twitter website. If news agencies or bloggers could post a story within the platform instead of hopping off the site through a link, people could theoretically get more news and info out of the actual site.
The Issue with Twitter Changes
However, this desire is at odds with content providers who would rather have people see the link on Twitter and then view the content, as well as ads, on their own site. If all their content was locked up in Twitter, views and ad revenue goes down, which means that the sites would have less ability to generate the content. At the same time, Twitter is losing the potential for ad revenue as people abandon their site to go view more in depth articles or media.
One thing is for sure, brands love Twitter. And people enjoy following their favorite brands on the platform. Large companies use Twitter as hub for customer service, public relations and market research. In recent years they have found more ways to leverage their service for providing advertising opportunities to generate revenue, something the platform had struggled with in it’s earlier years.
Twitter’s 320 million strong user base is dedicated, which is a very good thing for engaged return traffic pumping out almost 500 million tweets per day, according to ExpandedRamblings.com. This number is staggering but pales in comparison to larger platforms like Facebook with 1.2 billion users. To continue growing and competing in the social media landscape, Twitter needs to make some dramatic changes without alienating content providers or users.
What do you think Twitter should do?
