Twitter, the Internet social media company known for its 140-character tweets that allow people to broadcast messages to audiences of followers, is not in a good place financially.
The company’s stock price has fallen by two-thirds in the last three years, and it’s downsized from a peak of 3,900 employees to a current headcount of 3,450, cutting the space of its San Francisco headquarters by 30 percent this year alone.
The company has never been hugely profitable and has in the past sought to sell itself to Google, Verizon, Disney and Salesforce, only to be spurned in turn by each firm.
Although Twitter has been more shrill in the media than other players such as Facebook and Instagram, it’s increasingly finding itself a technological dinosaur, outmaneuvered by more advanced competitors, shedding users and discovering that its grab bag of acquisitions made in desperate attempts to boost its revenues have not played out as well as the company had hoped.
A thorough examination of Twitter must come face to face with the reality that a company based around broadcasting 140-character text messages is likely wildly overvalued in today’s high-tech marketplace.
Although Twitter has tried to innovate by incorporating photos and videos in its tweets, the concept of continuously broadcasting one’s ideas on individual, personalized channels rather than in a social forum as on networks like Facebook or Tsu is an odd anachronism that may only be valuable to celebrities in certain industries or entertainment.
For those users who can’t afford to pay someone to tweet for them all day, the burden of constantly updating a non-paying audience with relevant messages that are fact-checked, grammar-and-spelling-corrected and sanitized for off-color content is probably too onerous.
The idea of a tweet — a simple text message, perhaps on occasion enhanced by a photo or a video — just doesn’t carry the same value public relations-wise as a press release, an advertisement or a commercial. And many of the companies and individuals that already produce other collateral formats on a regular basis will continue to do so even as they tweet.
And so, unless a user is a Hollywood personality or perhaps working in the fast-paced world of, say, stocks and bonds, the redundancy (and often, irrelevancy) of most tweets is both obvious and painful.
By now, even social media junkies will freely admit that a steady diet of tweets leaves them both information-starved and over-bothered by a nonstop barrage of what invariably is perceived to be junk or superfluous fluff.
Market research confirms this, with an analysis firm reporting that on average, 40 percent of tweets are “pointless babble,” with another 38 percent being “conversational” and just four percent being considered “news.” Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted that most users’ tweets are “short burst[s] of inconsequential information.”
Unlike Facebook or Snapchat, there has never been a conscious push by Twitter to cater to young people, nor has there been a huge effort made to leverage the brevity of its messages on other media, such as LED signboards, portable devices or smart watches.
Twitter overestimated the attention spans of followers even as it began to attack the content of its users’ messages. High-profile bans of celebrities and attention-pulling personalities like actor Adam Baldwin and conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos only drew negative publicity to the company instead of generating income and adding users.
Twitter overtly maintains a stance that hateful, libelous or offensive tweets are grounds for banning people from its platform. But by trying to be ultra-politically correct, Twitter has almost always shot itself in the foot from a financial perspective.
Recently, the company issued a statement that its newest ban may be placed on one of its most celebrated users, President-Elect Donald Trump. Specifically, in regards to Trump, the messaging firm released a generic statement that read, “Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies.”
Over the years, many of Trump’s tweets have found fault with individuals ranging from Rosie O’Donnell to Hillary Clinton. Twitter is clearly attempting to cater to politically correct liberals and Democrats with its arbitrary censorship.
Rather than the company excoriating users for their content, Twitter should be hyping the incendiary and inflammatory value of tweets, especially those of celebrity users.
If Twitter wants to increase followers’ attention spans and page views, it should encourage any attempts to promote its platform, even if it means courting controversy. Like a proverbial car wreck, tweets should be celebrated as messages that can sometimes be hard to look away from, rather than as data that must be judged on accuracy, propriety and political correctness 100 percent of the time. For a company that’s rapidly sliding toward irrelevancy and/or insolvency, this is just one more in a string of strategically unwise decisions.
Even if Twitter rescinds its threat of canceling Donald Trump’s account, it needs to take a long look at reasons for the company to exist in future years as channels of communications multiply and media networks increasingly overlap.
Like Yahoo, Twitter’s glory days are surely behind it, and the company is struggling to find both relevancy and a competitive footing as other platforms allow more creative ways to send messages and more exciting ways to view them. Even the advertising on other platforms is more attractive and better integrated.
Ultimately, the real problem for Twitter is the perceived value of its tweets. Unless its users collectively aim higher with their content, their brief 140-character communiques will continue to be viewed as the equivalent of digital graffiti, rather than as sage quotations or deep messages worth preserving for posterity. While graffiti may have its own universe of devoted fans, their collective numbers (not to mention their net worth) is hardly the stuff of Wall Street dreams.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
