Heading into the tech company's highly anticipated initial public offering, a problem with users leaving Twitter because they find it too confusing or unnecessary isn't something the company wants to hear about.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll tried to find the rate at which people are signing up and quitting Twitter, and the results could be a turn-off for potential investors:
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Emphasis added. That's 43 percent of those surveyed saying they no longer use Twitter at all. Closing your account instead of leaving it on the shelf to collect dust, with the possibility of a potential return, is just cold. A comparative look at Facebook users with a higher survey pool found only seven percent of users left, and five percent shut their account completely.
Quitting Facebook has been trendy for years now. And yes, the site's growth rounded out to around 10 percent year-over-year after the service reached the half-a-billion user plateau. But it's been able to survive by providing a service to users: the modern phonebook for relatives and old acquaintances. (At least, the ones who are still on Facebook.)
But nothing much has been made about Twitter users bailing on the service. Some threaten to make the plunge after certain unpopular redesigns, but they never do. The tech company said it has 232 million active users in its IPO released last week. But heading into the road tour pitch to investors, questions will be raised about the company's size and sustainability. We've looked before at how Twitter isn't yet too big to fail: that the service could still evaporate if fortune take the wrong left turn at Albuquerque.
The number one reason survey participants gave for quitting Twitter was confusion about the service's unique conversation etiquette: at-replies and retweets, RTs and MTs, and let's not even mention hashtags. Any regular Twitter user tasked with explaining the service to a newcomer knows how difficult this can be. (Twitter acknowledged new users find it confusing in its IPO.)
Perhaps Twitter's biggest obstacle is it hasn't established that indispensable reason to stay signed up the way Facebook has. Maybe this quote, from a 2011 story by The New York Times' Jenna Wortham about quitting Facebook better applies to quitting the blue bird:
"People always raise an eyebrow. But my life has gone on just fine without it."
COMMENTARY: According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo,
"Twitter aims to become the fabric of every communication in the world and to eventually reach every person on the planet."
Still, Twitter acknowledged in its IPO prospectus that
"New users may initially find our product confusing."
The company prides itself on staying true to its roots: it lets people send 140-character messages and does not pack in scads of extraneous functions. Since its inception, Twitter has resisted overtly manipulating how people use its platform, instead preferring conventions to be formed organically.
As a result, new users often find it initially difficult to grasp how discussions ebb and flow, complaining that features such as the "hashtags" that group Tweets by topic, abbreviations for basic functions (for instance, "RT" for retweet) and shortened Web links, are geared towards a technologically-savvy crowd.
Larry Cornett, a former executive at Yahoo and designer at Apple, who now runs product strategy and design consulting firm Brilliant Forge says.
"The average person that's coming on here, they're still baffled by it. If they want the mass adoption and that daily engagement, they have to make it really easy for people to consume."
According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, 38 percent of 2,217 people who do not use Twitter said they did not find it that interesting or useful. Thirteen percent said they do not understand what to use Twitter for. The results have a credibility interval of 2.4 percent.
Twitter has taken steps to help new members. In December 2011, it introduced a new "Discover" section to highlight the most popular discussion topics based on a person's location and interests.
The company also simplified some features and rolled out new tools that embed photos and videos directly in a person's tweet stream, making for a richer and easier-to-use experience.
These changes may mean that Twitter's retention rate for the past several months is better than its overall retention rate, which includes people who joined years ago, say analysts.
Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, said Twitter's current user base is already big enough to be valuable to advertisers. Investors need to get more comfortable with the idea that Twitter is not for everyone, he said.
He said.
"The practical matter is that this is a niche medium. Their appeal, they will never be as broad as Facebook."
Twitter As A Firehose
At its heart, Twitter is a firehose. Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers. It’s what makes Twitter feel like the real-time pulse of the world. But it could also be preventing Twitter from growing. Follow too many people, and you lose track of those you love and stop following anyone new.
Imagine you’ve just joined Twitter. You follow some popular accounts of big publishers and celebrities you’re interested in, as well as some friends and acquaintances. The unfiltered feed works. You get up-to-the-minute news and stay aware of what people you know are up to. There aren’t so many tweets in your stream yet that you miss the ones from the people you care about most.
But then you follow a few more people, and then a few more. You find more distant acquaintances and colleagues on Twitter so you follow them. You subscribe to experts in the niche areas you geek out about. Friends retweet something funny and you follow the author. Or somebody random @ replies and follows you so you do the polite thing and follow back.
Gradually, your feed gets noisier and noisier. A few of the accounts you’ve followed post dozens of times a day and drown out everyone else (TechCrunch’s account is renowned for this). Twitter’s a stream, not a queue where you have to read every tweet, but you still. You find yourself missing great jokes, links, and insights from your closest friends who only tweet occasionally. When you visit Twitter, you see fewer interesting things in your feed than you used to.
And that’s where the problems for Twitter’s business start.
At Capacity
You put up with the mess but don’t enjoy your experience as much. If you’re a power user, you might create a Twitter List of your favorite people, but it takes a lot of effort. For everyone else who wants to trim the fat from follow lists, it’s tough to know where to start.
Twitter keeps on recommending more people to follow, both organically, and in exchange for ad dollars, but doesn’t tell you who you never interact with and should unfollow. It takes multiple clicks to unfollow someone, making it a laborious chore to ditch 10 accounts, and you still have hundreds left. You might have noticed that the “Follow Friday” trend where you’d recommend people other should follow has died off. No one has the bandwidth.
Your firehose is full, and it leads to two behaviors that are devastating to Twitter: You visit less and you stop following new people.
- The first means you encounter fewer of Twitter’s ads. It only gets paid when people click its ads, and you can’t click if you don’t visit. You’re also not around to @ reply, favorite, and retweet other people. That means they see fewer notifications and return to the site less frequently, so they see fewer ads, too. Another active user disappears, and Twitter’s MAU stagnates.
- The second means that the friends, acquaintances, publishers you would have followed end up with a smaller audience. No one wants to feel like they’re talking to a brick wall or shouting into a black hole. After a few days, weeks, or months of tweeting with no one listening, these people give up.
Twitter is littered with the corpses of accounts that passed away too young or never truly lived.
Quitter
Some reports, like one from Mike Isaac, peg Twitter at having more than 1 billion registered users, yet in their IPO filing, Twitter confirms that only 218 million are active. That’s a painful attrition rate that is hindering Twitter’s ability to grow large enough to become profitable.
Worse yet, people who quit Twitter or just hardly visit likely return to Facebook. It’s literally friendlier. People have a built-in audience of real-life chums who Like and comment on their posts. They don’t have to be ‘thought leaders’ battling to be heard. They accumulate friends just by living, and it’s not a contest to have the most connections.
Even if it were, Facebook’s filtered feed is built to adapt to however many friends you make or Pages you Like. Rather than show an unfiltered feed of everything posted by everyone in your social and interest graph, it just shows you the best posts — the ones with the most Likes and comments from the people you interact with most.
That doesn’t make it as good as Twitter at being a source of breaking real-time news, but Facebook does its best to make sure your feed is always interesting. It doesn’t always succeed, but the filtering happens automatically. And Facebook gives you direct control, allowing you to select how frequently you want certain people to appear in your feed or even what kind of stories (photos, games) you want to see. These controls are little-known and buried behind far too many clicks to be used efficiently, so it has room to improve.
Twitter’s not the only one with unfiltered feed problems. Instagram may eventually have to grapple with it. But for now it’s younger, has fewer users, and its casual feed of photos is less vulnerable to noise since it’s just pretty pictures.
Getting people to manage their own streams is an extraordinarily tough design problem. But Twitter’s role as the most popular unfiltered feed on the web means it needs to pioneer ways to make the format sustainable as it grows.
Fixing The Firehose
Twitter should not abandon its unfiltered feed. It’s the foundation of its whole user experience. Still, there are other ways to alleviate the overflowing firehose problem.
Twitter may want to forge as many connections in its “interest graph” as possible. Each follow tells it more about what kinds of ads to target to people. But the company should look to make it easier to unfollow people who clutter your feed.
First, making it quicker to unfollow someone by adding a button to expanded tweets would help. More forcefully, Twitter could analyze which people you never @ reply, retweet, favorite, expand the tweets of, or visit the profile of. Then it could suggest that you unfollow them either in the sidebar or with an immediately accessible button on their tweets in the stream.
Twitter could also provide a feed-cleaning tool. It could rank who you follow by your engagement with them, and make it easy to bulk unfollow people you don’t care about but who tweet a lot, or add to a List the people you interact with most. These tools will need to work from mobile, considering 75 percent of Twitter users access the service from their small screens.
If Twitter doesn’t address these issues, veteran users may tune out and new recruits might never see the magic of its global forum. There’s nothing like tweeting something and getting responses within seconds. It makes the whole world feel smaller. The challenge is whether Twitter can retain its intimate town square atmosphere for everyone as it grows to become a digital city…and a public company.
Courtesy of an article dated October 20, 2013 appearing in The Atlantic Wire and an article dated October 5, 2013 appearing in TechCrunch, an article dated October 20, 2013 appearing in Reuters
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