March 25, 2014
There has been a lot of talk lately on the future of Twitter so it seemed an appropriate time to weigh in as it is one of our favorite websites and investments.
From a consumer perspective the beauty of twitter is it’s simplicity. It is truly a social network for all. No matter what your interests are there is something for you on twitter. 140 characters can be manifested in thousands of use cases. It allows for both one to one communication and one to many which creates millions of fascinating conversations.
From a business perspective twitter sells the best advertisements in the game right now. Their promoted posts are approximately 6-7% effective which is quite literally hundreds of time more effective than banner ads. Believe it or not you are more likely to survive a plane crash than to click on a banner ad. Why are these advertisements so fantastic? because they are tailored to your interests.
Ex. You follow Pepsi, you follow Coke so you might be receptive to an advertisement about RC Cola.
Ex. You follow Chipotle, you follow Moe’s so you might be receptive to an advertisement from Taco Bell.
The beauty of these interests is that they are know as evergreen or durable interests meaning you will probably be interested in them for years to come.
So now that I have professed my love for Twitter its time to add value and plan for the future. Here are three things I want for twitter
- Wall to wall: Facebook does a great job of cataloging your relationship with someone via their wall to wall feature (or “see friendship” for the newbies). Twitter does not do this at all. Adding a feature like this would increase the utility of the platform for all. With this feature tweeters could gain insight on their relationship with their followers.
Twitter does its best work in the first five minutes after a disaster, and its worst in the twelve hours after that.
— Matt Roller (@rolldiggity) April 15, 2013
- Editable tweets: The simplicity of the RT is equally responsible for its downfall. I find something interesting and I have the ability to retweet it without evaluating its veracity. Once a few followers grab hold of it the tweet can go global. News changes rapidly and Twitter needs to give followers tools to update the info they put into the world to stay relevant as an veritable information source.
- Altitude: Trending topics have put a never before seen pulse on global conversations. At any moment in time we can see who is talking about what and where. Prior to twitter this was only available in silos. The problem today is we have no context. Perhaps people are tweeting about a #hashtag i’ve created but how big is my conversation compared to my competitors? How high up is my conversation versus theirs? How engaged are my followers compared to theirs? Creating a measure of altitude would also ad tremendous value and a big of game mechanics to twitter’s ad products.
So there we have my simply vision for twitter’s future. What do you think? Love it? hate it? Let me know.