The future of Twitter: to be the next giant or to return to a small company

On November 9, according to foreign media reports, The Economist recently published an article pointing out that, although Twitter has so far achieved great success, the company has not achieved the size expected by many investors. The Economist's article, which analyzes Twitter's future prospects, argues that Twitter needs to address the problem of weak user growth, and here's what this article is about.

Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, used to be an impromptu comedian who developed his Dick Costolo, which has played a major role in his business world, especially in the face of angry, irritable users in his career. November 7, Costolo's Twitter company ushered in the first anniversary of the listing. Although the initial performance of Twitter was praised and welcomed by the industry, investors ' comments were mixed. No one can articulate Twitter's future prospects. But some believe the company could become the next digital advertising giant, on an equal footing with technology giants such as Google and Facebook. However, there are also those who believe that Twitter may shrink into a small company, which, though once large, could eventually shrink sharply.

Costolo has made a huge commitment to his followers, saying in his commitment, "our ambition is to make Twitter the largest user group in the world." "Since its inception in 2006, Twitter has attracted a large number of users, including Queen Elizabeth to ordinary people, and Twitter has played a big role in some of the world's most important events," he added. Peter Stabler, a rich-country securities analyst, Peter Stabler that Twitter has flashed through the mass media, which means "the effect of the free promotion of Twitter in the history of capitalism is better than that of any other company."

According to the data, about 285 million people are logged into Twitter each month, with about 20% of US smartphone users using Twitter, and about 9% of smartphone users in other regions use the social networking site. Twitter content is free for users to share, mainly from Twitter users, but Twitter can generate revenue by inserting ads into users ' messages. Big consumer brands are willing to use this approach because they can send more highly correlated advertising messages based on their interests and location, and they can also use their own Twitter messages and send ads to other users based on real-time conversations.

Since 2012, Twitter has doubled its revenues by more than four times times and is expected to reach $1.4 billion this year. Similar to other technology companies, Twitter's valuations are soaring. Twitter, which valued about $1 billion trillion in 2009, now has a market capitalisation of $25 billion trillion, and it is still in market value after the company's recent dismal earnings decline.

Twitter has also been hugely profitable as advertisers spend huge sums of money and more resources to buy digital ads. To some extent, Twitter itself is a "mobile native" Company: When Twitter was created, users could receive text messages from Twitter on their phones. This may also give Twitter an advantage over other competitors, who need to address complex issues such as moving desktop devices to mobile devices. Today, about 75% of Twitter's advertising revenue comes from mobile devices.

So far, however, Twitter has become more of a cultural force than a commercial power. According to General accounting standards, Twitter is still not profitable, perhaps at least 2017 years to change the adverse situation. If 45% of the revenue is not used to pay equity awards this year, Twitter may be able to make a profit this year (compared with Facebook, which accounts for almost 15% of its revenue and about 8%). But, in a highly competitive market, Twitter does need to keep employees, or else they will move to Google, or leave their businesses, or join other potential start-ups.

A year ago, when Twitter came on the market, it was destined to confront Facebook head-on, and ultimately with Google in the digital advertising market. Twitter now seems to have little chance of catching up with the tech giants. Twitter's subscriber growth has slowed in recent days, and Facebook is far from it. According to the data, Facebook's current monthly number of active subscribers has reached 1.4 billion, about four times times that of Twitter. Facebook has accounted for 10% of U.S. digital advertising spending, according to emarketer, a market research institute. Advertisers want online ads to integrate scale and precision to help put customized ads on, but Twitter has neither the largest number of users nor the most accurate target customization capabilities.

"Twitter has developed an indispensable media channel for us, but the extent of this ' OMD ' is not the same," said Ben Winkler, chief digital officer of Wordwide, an advertising agency that buys ads for clients. For example, glass water and petrol are essential supplies, but their value is not the same. ”

In fact, for many marketers, they tend to buy ads for Google and Facebook, because that is their core digital advertising power, before they consider buying Twitter ads.

The first anniversary of the IPO offers the opportunity for Twitter to rethink its current problems. If you have to use nearly 140 words to describe the challenges that Twitter faces, then this is: complexity, competition, and culture. For those who are not accustomed to the Twitter interface and communication style, Twitter can be a hassle. In the past year, Twitter has become more accessible and more convenient for users to focus on other users, but Twitter needs to be redesigned to be mainstream. After realising that Twitter might not be the right fit for all users, Costolo and his colleagues began to focus on users who viewed Twitter messages but never logged in, which is about twice times the size of active users. However, these users are not as valuable as active users in the eyes of advertisers.

The potential of digital advertising is that it has more accurate goals and data collection capabilities. But in these areas, Twitter lags behind Facebook. Twitter allows advertisers to send ads to users based on their potential concerns, including the companies and individuals they are interested in, and the message content they send. But Twitter is not as capable as Facebook to collect detailed data about users, such as universities, birth dates, etc.

Twitter's culture has been adversely affected by infighting since its inception. In its only 4-year history, Costolo is already the company's third chief executive. Over the past 6 months, the wave of executive resignations in Twitter has continued to spread, such as chief operating Officer Ari Rohani Ali Rowghani's departure from Costolo and the company's replacement of its chief financial officer. In recent days, Kevin Weil, the new Twitter-appointed product director, Kevin Will, and Will's predecessor was demoted. Among Twitter executives, executives have a different view of the company's future, which is certainly hard to form a joint effort. "Twitter is full of opportunities but weak in execution," said one senior executive who understands Twitter, saying it is also the main reason for the hit. "We've been focusing on correcting problems rather than doing the right thing immediately," says Adam Bain, Adam Bern of Twitter's chief battalion. ”

The Twitter program continues to expand, not only to increase the size of users, but also to send ads to users who use other mobile apps. Twitter bought a mobile ad trader Mopub,mopub before it went public last year to help Twitter launch ads on other companies ' apps in real time. More recently, Twitter has launched a series of products called fabric that will make it easier for developers to use other apps to consolidate the difficulty of integrating Twitter content (and, of course, Twitter to share revenue).

Costolo is well aware that he needs to focus on the information companies that were born soon, such as the WhatsApp now owned by Facebook, and Snapchat, which attract a large number of young users and will attract advertisers ' attention and eventually Rob Twitter of ad revenue. To keep the momentum from spreading, Costolo also plans to make it easier for users to chat privately on Twitter.

Over time, users want Twitter to provide more space for more video ads (because advertisers like this form of advertising) and launch attractive E-commerce services so that users can click on Twitter to buy goods. Some in the industry remain skeptical that Twitter could be bought by other companies. Of course, if Twitter's growth stagnates and its share price falls sharply to very low procedures, big companies such as Google are likely to consider merging Twitter. (Niuniu)