Everyone on the Internet has been talking about Twitter’s premature death. A few months ago, I wrote an article on the global reach of Twitter ‘How far can your Twitter bird chirp?’ and today, about it’s decline. How did this happen? First, there was the elimination of the Twitter share counter. Then came the day Twitter crashed. What’s next? Everyone is squirming in their seats to see what will happen in the near future.. Is Twitter going to fall? Or will it overcome all the challenges? Personally, I wish it survives ! I believe it is a great tool, and an amazing source of information.. I wrote this article to describe the situation, and try to figure out what is going to happen to the blue chirping bird..
Remodelling Twitter
Obviously , it is panic on board for Twitter. They see their stocks spiralling down, their impact decreasing online. They are testing, and attempting different changes. These changes will either be accepted, or ignored (maybe even rejected) by its users. That is a risk the company is taking. But do they have any other option? Not really. R&D and implementation is their only move at the moment. They need to do something radical to turn the situation around.
Twitter’s moves :
Critics have long talked about the inconvenience of following conversations on Twitter. In the past, when users wanted to read a full conversation, it expanded within their timeline. In addition to that, if it was a lengthy conversation, not all replies would show. Twitter worked on this negative aspect, and changed it.. Now, when users click on a tweet, a new window pops out, showing the full conversation with all the replies to that tweet. Twitter said it would make it easier for users, and especially the new ones.
After that move, Twitter announced its new Facebook-like timeline. Indeed, they launched it a few days ago. This new feature sorts tweets based on relevancy instead of in a chronological order. Basically, you get the best and most important tweets from the people you follow on top of your timeline. Some might ask how is this different from the ‘While you were away’ feature. Actually, it is different, in the sense that ‘while you were away’ tweets recap what users missed in a certain time laps. Whereas ‘best tweets first’ feature, is always relevant, and at the top of the timeline.
There are different opinions about these two new steps that Twitter took. Some are happy that Twitter is reacting to its struggles and is attempting to do something about it, while others are criticising the changes.
If you are curious to try out this new feature, now you can on all the platforms (Website, iOS and Android). You just need to go to your Timeline settings, and activate the ‘Show me the best Tweets first’ feature.
What’s next?
Twitter seems to be adapting some Facebook moves. However, a lot of questions are asked. Will users be receptive to these changes? Will they reject them? How will this help Twitter survive? We maybe need to just wait and see.. All we see online, whether on Mashable or on CNBC, are Twitter news updates.
Despite the critical situation Twitter is going through right now, CEO Jack Dorsey said that his company has $3.5 billion dollars. I guess this gives them plenty of time (412 years to be exact) to get back on track. They shouldn’t rest on their laurels, or they will end up like Yahoo: alive but quite inexistant.
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Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique.
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