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7 THINGS WE HATE ABOUT TWITTER, BUT CORRECTING THEM IS NOT ENOUGH, TWITTER NEEDS GAME-CHANGING CHANGES

You probably either love Twitter for its quirkiness and brevity or see it as a pointless waste of time. After nearly a decade on the social scene, Twitter still needs to improve its user experience and fill in notable gaps in the service. These seven problems are long overdue for a fix.

7 Things Twitter needs to fix (right now)

Twitter mostly lets you do what you want, and while that freedom is a big part of what makes the platform special, it also contributes to an increasingly frustrating and lackluster experience. If you want to surface relevant tweets about a recent Supreme Court ruling within hours of a decision, you should have the proper tools to do so. Unfortunately, promoted tweets are just as likely to show up as the first result in a search as a tweet from an on-the-scene court reporter. The decade-old social network faces many different challenges, but these seven issues are particularly maddening because they're glaring issues that Twitter seems to simply ignore.

Conversation flow on Twitter a no-go

It's a chore to join and follow conversations on Twitter. The company's system for threaded conversations, based on chronological order and the people who contribute via @replies, is a convoluted mess. Unlike message boards and forums that delineate responses in chronological and hierarchical order based on single topics, Twitter conversations are a running feed. The bits and pieces of conversation included in Twitter feeds have too many variables, and the format makes it virtually impossible to follow responses in context. The conversations on Twitter simply have no flow, and the current system has got to go.

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Twitter needs to manage and share 'what's happening'

The concept of Twitter is based on one simple, all-encompassing question — "What's happening?" — but the company doesn't always do a good job sharing its users' answers. Instead of embracing and properly curating the breaking news and live events that play out on Twitter, the company leaves these tasks mostly to chance and circumstance. When humanity shows its face in surprising ways or terrible tragedy strikes, Twitter should do a better job of helping you follow along. A list of top 10 trends simply doesn't cut it anymore.

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Unfortunate lack of Follower management tools

Twitter doesn't do you any favors when it comes to managing your "Followers" or the accounts that follow them. The two lists, located on your profile page, show Twitter members in reverse-chronological order based on when they followed you or when they were followed, on a seemingly infinitely, scrollable page. There are no tools to manage your existing Followers, so people who want to bring order to their Twitter accounts are in for a rude awakening. It's simply inexcusable for Twitter to leave this problem unaddressed.

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Twitter Direct Messages and 'DM fails'

Twitter's "Direct Messages" (DMs) are a basic, yet powerful tool that lets you communicate privately, but the feature has been riddled with problems since its inception. "DM fails," as the Cool Kids say, have ended careers in rather spectacular fashion (Anthony Weiner). Twitter recently gave its users the capability to receive messages from any user (not only mutual followers), and the company says it will remove the 140-character limit on DMs in July. However, even the company's CFO and head of product have posted tweets intended for private viewing, and it's fair to say that nobody is safe from the occasional DM fail.

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Twitter ads should be more relevant — or at least interesting

All too often, the ads you see in your Twitter feed aren't even remotely relevant to your interests. Twitter's targeting capabilities don't match its competitors, and in addition, many of the ads it runs are downright boring. Promoted tweets, accounts and mobile apps frequently come off as safe, tried-and-true, and mundane. Twitter could be a canvas for marketing creativity, but instead it floods users with monotonous ads and often serves the same ads numerous times a day. Some of this is on the advertisers, but Twitter could provide a creative spark if it changed the format of its ads.

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Twitter's sorry search feature

Most Twitter users agree its search function is either broken or barely functional. Searching for news, topics, users and even hashtags on Twitter is a lackluster experience compared to other platforms. And its search results serve up too much noise and not enough valuable results. Twitter users are accustomed to the sorry state of search today, but that's not the way it should be, and it's on Twitter to fix the problem.

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Twitter's lackluster location experience

Twitter could deliver a more location-aware platform. It's not entirely Twitter's fault that many users choose not include location data with their tweets, but the company also hasn't made any sort of concerted effort to explain why users should tag tweets with locations. And unfortunately, even tweets that do get tagged with a location don't always appear where they should. For example, I recently searched for nearby photos of "sunsets" while in Southern California, and the top result was for Maui. If Twitter designed a captivating experience around location it could not only help users learn more about "what's happening" now, but what's happening nearby.

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COMMENTARY:   In August 2014, Twitter admitted in its IPO filing for the quarter ending June 30, 2014, that approximately 11 percent of its 271M active users — 29.8 million accounts — solely used third-party applications to access its service.

That's not necessarily a great thing for the company's bottom line -- that's 30 million accounts that aren't looking at or clicking on Twitter ads and 23 million that aren't necessarily actively interacting with their feeds.

It also reported that 23 million or 8.5 percent of monthly active users used third party applications that accessed Twitter without user-initiated action.   

Twitter also said that fake or spam accounts made up less than 5% of its monthly active users.

Here are some spellbinding Twitter stats:  

• 6,000 tweets every second, on average, are tweeted on Twitter (visualize them here)
• 350,000 tweets sent per minute 
• 500 million tweets per day
• 200 billion tweets per year.

The chart below shows the number of tweets per day throughout Twitter's history:

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According to researchers, the 29.8 million automated accounts generate up to 60% of total tweets. A scary stat if there ever was.  This would mean that out of the 200 billion tweets per year, approximately 120 billion tweets are being generated by third party software like Hootsuite, Hubspot, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Bundlepost, etc. 

In a previous blog post, I expressed serious concerns about Twitter and and a lack of confidence in Jack Dorsey.  I just don't think that he has the chops to lead two troubled companies simultaneously. I have not seen any "bold" moves.  By "bold" moves, I mean game-changing and unique products or changes to Twitter that will create headlines and attract new users and increase engagement.  This is important for users as well as advertisers who are starting to get anxious and losing confidence in Twitter as a go-to ad platform.  If these bold moves are in the works, Jack better get them out in 2016, otherwise his next earnings conference call is going to be very, very tense.  

Having dropped these nuclear bomb criticisms, I believe that Twitter needs to be re-invented and radically changed.  Tweets alone, whether 140-characters or longer, are not going to change user perceptions of Twitter.   Bottomline:  Twitter cannot rely solely on being a news and information broadcasting platform.  Twitter needs to be much more than this.  It really needs to offer something entirely new, exciting, game changing and fill a real need in the marketplace.  Twitter may have filled users expectations for news and information in real-time (near), but other social networks are filling this need as well, they just don't call them tweets. 

Courtesy of an article dated July 1, 2015 appearing in CIO, an article dated August 13, 2014 appearing in ZDNet , an article dated August 12, 2014 appearing in CNN Money, an article dated April 20, 2015 appearing in Brandon Gaille and the Twitter Usage Stats reported as of January 4, 20156 by Internet Live Stats 

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FOR CEO JACK DORSEY LEADING TWITTER AND SQUARE AT THE SAME TIME MEANS NO OFFICE OR DESK AND 18-HOUR DAYS

Being CEO at two publicly traded companies means 18-hour days, a meticulous schedule and impromptu business meetings

Twitter Inc.’s executive chairman, Omid Kordestani, struggled to find time in Jack Dorsey’s jam-packed schedule for their weekly chat. So he offered to be the CEO’s driver for the day.

On a recent morning, Mr. Kordestani weaved through Silicon Valley traffic in his Tesla Model S as the pair talked business.

Mr. Kordestani said.  

“We just maximize every hour we can, however we can do it.”

It is a telling snapshot of the demands that now confront Mr. Dorsey, who recently embarked on the herculean task of running both Twitter and payments firm Square Inc.  His official return as Twitter chief in October, and Square’s IPO one month ago, put Mr. Dorsey in the rare class of CEOs charged with simultaneously leading two publicly traded companies.

The dual role invoked comparisons to tech luminaries Steve Jobs, who ran Apple Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios while they were both publicly traded, and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors Inc. and privately held rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Inc.

Mr. Musk, for one, isn’t an advocate.  Mr. Muisk said at a conference in October.  

“I wouldn’t recommend running two companies.  It really decreases your freedom a lot.”

He has said he would eventually step back from everyday operations at Tesla. Mr. Musk had no further comment.

Mr. Dorsey, 39 years old, isn’t married and doesn’t have any children unlike Messrs. Jobs and Musk. He will likely have little free time as both Twitter and Square are at critical junctures.  Twitter is working to show frustrated investors the social media service has mass-market appeal.  Square is trying to prove it can expand beyond the intensely competitive payments space.  Neither is profitable.

Twitter shares are trading at an all-time low and have fallen about 13% since Mr. Dorsey was named CEO. Square’s shares have risen about 35% since the IPO on Nov. 19, but they still trade below the price private investors paid last year.

Twitter and Square declined to make Mr. Dorsey or his executive teams available for comment.

Mr. Dorsey has looked to Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger as something of a mentor because of the multifaceted businesses he oversees, ranging from a movie studio and television networks to theme parks and cruise lines. Mr. Dorsey joined Disney’s board in 2013.

Mr. Iger said he occasionally counsels Mr. Dorsey on business matters. Mr. Iger said.  

“I am not involved in his businesses, so I am a good sounding board for him.” 

Mr. Iger said in an interview.

"To run two companies at once, you need a few things and Jack has them.  You need the ability to focus and prioritize and compartmentalize...and you need great people under you.”

Mr. Dorsey has cited strong leadership under him to help him manage the day-to-day, though he hasn’t assigned a No. 2 at either company.  At Twitter, he has eight direct reports—including operating chief Adam Bain and finance chief Anthony Noto—and 10 at Square, including one C-suite executive, CFO Sarah Friar.

Eric Flamholtz, professor emeritus of the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management, said.

“A classic CEO should have his hands in everything:  financials, operations, personnel.  But if you’re splitting your time between the two companies, it becomes much more about who the people are around you.”

Others have a different view.  Suhail Rizvi, whose firm Rizvi Traverse Management LLC is an investor in Twitter and Square, through a spokesman, said.  

“Managing multiple companies is the wrong way to look at the challenge.  The key is, can [Twitter] continue to develop new products and attract the best talent?  These are the areas in which Jack excels.”

For now, Mr. Dorsey appears to be sticking to a meticulous schedule with long hours.  Representatives of Twitter and Square say Mr. Dorsey works as much as 18 hours per weekday, spending his mornings at Twitter and afternoons at Square, which are located a block from each other in San Francisco’s mid-Market neighborhood.

Mr. Dorsey is disciplined about his schedule and habits. For example, current and former Twitter employees say he is known to abruptly get up at the designated end time of a meeting, simply saying,

“I’ve got to go.”

He typically starts his days with coffee at Blue Bottle, located between the two headquarters. According to Twitter and Square, on Monday morning, Mr. Dorsey arrives at Twitter for five-hour meetings with his eight senior executives and Mr. Kordestani to review the business operations and projects.  At 1:30 p.m., he rushes over to Square to repeat the same exercise.   Mr. Dorsey tells executives to put their phones and laptops away—he has no office or desk at either company.

He also holds 30-minute check-ins with key deputies at each company on Wednesdays and Fridays. He remains in contact even when he isn’t physically present, Mr. Kordestani said.

During Square’s IPO roadshow, he would call Twitter from his hotel room in between meetings or at night after his schedule wound down, Mr. Kordestani said.

His placid temperament and preference for meditation and yoga contrast with the gregarious and ebullient nature of Dick Costolo, who was Twitter CEO for five years before resigning in June.  Mr. Kordestani said.  

“When he comes into the room you get this sense of comfort that you’re with a very grounded person.” 

Still, Mr. Dorsey is said to get bogged down in minutiae. Two people who worked closely with him say he would at times drop everything to focus on, say, an app logo’s hue, or the wording of sections of a Web page.

While employees say he has lifted morale at Twitter, managers continue to depart.  In recent weeks, Twitter’s head of design, director of corporate strategy and a senior engineering executive have left or announced plans to leave.

A Twitter spokesman said that each of those people left for different reasons.

Over the past several months, Mr. Dorsey has reviewed the entire organization, asked for feedback about the company’s priorities and the reporting structure including those on the senior management team, according to people familiar with the matter.

When asked what he thinks of Mr. Dorsey’s performance so far, Mr. Rizvi, the investor, said:

“The results will be apparent over the next few quarters.”

Write to Yoree Koh at [email protected] and Greg Bensinger at [email protected]

COMMENTARY:  Just when Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) stock looked like it couldn't go any lower, it did. Then it did again. Twitter shares began a steep descent from around $53 in April to about $35 by mid-ear as investor concerns about the company's slowing user growth mounted.  At the end of today's trading, Twitter shares closed at $22.14, down $0.85 or -3.70%, a new low for Twitter.

Investors were hoping the company's decision this summer to bring back co-founder Jack Dorsey as CEO would quickly spark big, game-changing strategic moves. But, so far, the Street appears unimpressed.

Dorsey's believers

Chief Investment Officer Rizvi Traverse, whose investment firm has a stake in both Twitter and Square, is among the investors betting Dorsey is the right fit for Twitter as the company aims to address the social platform's slowing user growth problem.

But Rizvi says investors will have to wait longer to see the fruit of Dorsey's return.

An excerpt from a Dec. 21 Wall Street Journal article captures Rizvi's confidence: When asked what he thinks of Mr. Dorsey's performance so far, Mr. Rizvi, the investor, said:

'The results will be apparent over the next few quarters.'"

Similarly, in an October interview with CNBC, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams expressed confidence in Dorsey's plans to make "bold" moves. Williams believes these big changes will be evident in "months."

So far, the pace of change at Twitter from an outsider's perspective remains similar to the unsatisfactory pace under former CEO Dick Costolo's reign.  And this is driving uncertainty in the stock market toward the stock, playing a key role in the continued sell-off.

Embracing change

Twitter product lead Kevin Weil said during a Code/Mobile interview in October that Dorsey is encouraging Twitter managers to challenge their own assumptions. Weil even went as far as to say that the company is willing to change "something that's at the core of Twitter," prompting speculation that Twitter could even drop its 140-character limit for tweets.

One recent move that was supposed to represent a catalyst for the company was Twitter's October-launched Moments, a.k.a. "project lighting." But the new Twitter feature, which aims to rapidly curate news, doesn't appear to sport the gusto needed to transform the service into the mass-market player investors are hoping for.

While investors should, indeed, expect to see successful new features from Twitter following Dorsey's return, Rizvi is probably right that it's going to take "the next few quarters" for the co-founder's impact to be realized. Even Twitter's Moments feature isn't entirely representative of Dorsey's return to the company; the product was already deep into development when Costolo resigned.

Twitter Apps Waning

Twitter's company-owned apps have lost their appeal with users.  Vine, an app that creates 6-second videos, had 100 milli0n monthly active users at the end of September 2015, but has been overtaken and left in the dust by Facebook's Instagram with 400 million monthly active users.  Persiscope, a mobile app acquired by Twitter earlier this year, that lets you broadcast live video to your followers, has hit a brick wall with new users.  According to RE/CODE, Periscope only has 10 million monthly active users.  

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Closing Comments

In a previous blog post, I expressed serious concerns about Twitter and and a lack of confidence in Jack Dorsey.  I just don't think that he has the chops to lead two troubled companies simultaneously. I have not seen any "bold" moves.  By "bold" moves, I mean historic, breakthrough or disruptive new products or changes to Twitter that will create headlines and attract new users and increase engagement.  This is important for users as well as advertisers who are starting to get anxious and losing confidence in Twitter as a go-to ad platform.  If these bold moves are in the works, Jack better get them out before year-end, otherwise his next earnings conference call is going to be very, very tense.  

Having dropped these nuclear bomb criticisms, I believe that Twitter needs to be re-invented and radically changed.  Tweets alone, whether 140-characters or longer, are not going to change user perceptions of Twitter.  Twitter cannot rely solely on being a news and information broadcasting platform.  Twitter needs to be much more than this.  It really needs to offer something entirely new, exciting, game changing and fill a real need in the marketplace.  Twitter may have filled users expectations for news and information in real-time (near), but other social networks are filling this need as well, they just don't call them tweets. 

Courtesy of an article dated December 21, 2015 appearing in The Wall Street Journal and an article dated September 22, 2015 appearing in LinkedIn Pulse

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TWITTER REPORTS DISAPPOINTING Q3 2015 EARNINGS AND USER GROWTH, STOCK DIVES 10%, IS IT TIME FOR RADICAL CHANGES?

Twitter shares are crashing in after-hours trading after the company reported another quarter of disappointing user growth and a weak revenue forecast for the last three months of the year.

Here are the key Q3 numbers:

• Monthly active users: 320 million, versus the 324 million expected by analysts, and compared to 316 million users in the second quarter.
• Monthly active users, excluding SMS followers: 307 million users, compared to 304 million users in the second quarter.
• Revenue: $569 million, up 58% year-on-year, compared to the $559.6 million expected by analysts. Twitter had already pre-announced that revenue will be at or above the top end of its forecast range of $545 million to $560 million.
• Adjusted EPS: $0.10 versus the $0.05 expected by analysts.
• Net loss:  Another huge loss of $132 million, compared to a net loss of $175 million in the year-ago period.
• Q4 Revenue Guidance: $695 million to $710 million, versus analyst expectations of $739.7 million.

Twitter shares plunged roughly 13%, or $4.04, to $27.30 in after-hours trading Tuesday.

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It's not a great debut for Jack Dorsey, who was appointed CEO earlier this month. He previously served as interim CEO, and will be hosting his first earnings conference call with investors as the company's new chief later Tuesday. Wall Street will be looking for answers about how Dorsey intends to revitalize the company's flagging user growth and reverse the growing impression that Twitter could become a social-networking also-ran.

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To put Twitter's stalled user growth in perspective, the company added a total of 4 million new users this quarter. Facebook, more than four times the size of Twitter, added 49 million new monthly users during its second quarter.

Twitter also appears to have suffered a steep and sudden drop in the prices that it charges marketers to run ads on its service. Twitter revealed that its "cost per ad engagement" fell 39% year-over-year.

Dorsey said in prepared remarks that the company has simplified its "road map" and organization around a few big bets across Twitter, Periscope. and Vine that it believes represent the largest opportunities for growth.

Busy Period

It's been a busy few months for Twitter. In addition to appointing a new CEO, the company launched the new Moments feature, which tries to make it easier for new users of the service to follow live events, such as sports and presidential debates. And the money-losing company recently slashed 8% of its workforce.

While Twitter eliminated some of the uncertainty about its management by completing its CEO search, the appointment of Dorsey to the role creates more questions. The 38-year-old Twitter cofounder also serves as the full-time CEO of digital-payments company Square, which is in the process of preparing for an IPO.

Twitter's stock has plunged 41% from its 52-week high of $53.49, though it has rebounded from recent lows when shares were trading below the company's IPO price.

Twitter warned investors last quarter that they should not expect any meaningful user growth for a "considerable" amount of time. The question now is whether Dorsey has a plan to change that.

You can also view Twitter's press release regarding their Q3 2015 earnings report by clicking HERE

COMMENTARY:    Twitter's third quarter 2015 earnings failed to meet investor expectations on user growth and guidance for the fourth quarter 2015, driving down its stock price.  More specifically, Twitter continues to struggle in attracting and retaining new users to its platform, and its advertising business is facing challenges with respect to direct-response advertising.  

In addition, while ad engagement and videos have recently snowballed on the platform, the average cost per ad engagement continues to decline substantially. Notwithstanding these challenges, we think it’s too early to expect results from the new leadership. Product changes have recently accelerated on the platform (for both users and advertisers), and if successful, these initiatives could meaningfully drive growth over the coming quarters.

Key Takeaways From Twitter’s Third Quarter Earnings

User Growth Failed To Impress: Twitter’s total average monthly active user base was 320 million in Q3 2015, as compared to 316 million in the prior quarter. Excluding SMS fast followers, the MAU base was recorded at 307 million, which represented a sequential rise of 3 million users. These metrics failed to match expectations, as other social networks such as Facebook FB +0.00% and Instagram have seen much stronger growth. We believe the recent product innovations undertaken at Twitter should start to yield results (in terms of user base growth) going forward.

Guidance Came In Below Expectations: Twitter’s management guided for revenues of $695 million to $710 million for the fourth quarter of 2015. This came in significantly below average analyst estimates of $739.7 million. We believe this weak outlook indicates continued challenges in the company’s advertising business (most prominently in its direct response ad units).

Revenue Growth Driven By Rise In Ad Engagements: Twitter’s overall revenues rose by 58% annually to $569 million during Q3 2015. Advertising revenue increased by 60% in dollar terms and by 67% in FX-neutral terms. This was primarily driven by a 165% annual increase in the number of ad engagements, due to growth in both auto-play video ads and off-network advertising business. Off-network advertising revenue (which includes advertising through TellApart, TapCommerce and MoPub Network) contributed about 13% of overall ad revenue during the quarter. The average cost per ad engagement dropped by 39% annually, due to a shift towards lower-cost auto-play video ads. Going forward, we believe growth in overall ad engagements will continue to drive the company’s advertising business, as there is still significant potential to increase ad load levels on the micro-blogging platform.

Video Usage Has Gone Up Significantly On Twitter: Video consumption has been growing tremendously on Twitter of late with the launch of auto-play videos. Native video views have risen by up to 150 times across the Twitter, Periscope and Vine platforms over the past six months. As a result, video ads have gained much more prominence on Twitter over the past few months. Moreover, the company plans to pilot Promoted Moments (video-focused ads) across the U.S. during Q4 2015.

Innovation Has Accelerated On The Platform: One positive that we have noted of late is that product changes have accelerated under the leadership of Jack Dorsey. With new features such as Highlights on Android, Polls, and recently launched Moments, the company aims to step up engagement levels on the platform. Additionally, changes have also been made on the Vine and Periscope platforms, such as introducing music on Vine. While it’s too early to measure the precise impact of these changes, we believe these recent initiatives could drive growth in the coming quarters. Twitter’s efforts to simplify its service will be central to its long-term goal of drastically expanding its audience base, and we will be keeping an eye on its progress in meeting these goals.

Conclusion

I don't know about you, but I don't see Jack Dorsey turning around Twitter anytime soon.  The fact that Twitter will fail to exceed Q4 2015 guidance should give you a good hint.  All these wonderful things that Jack has implemented since he took over the helm as CEO (I actually consider him part-time CEO since he splits duties with Square) will do very little to increase new users, monthly active users, revenues and profitability.  

Twitter is very troubled company whose original business model has become outdated and has lost its luster.  It is no longer an exciting and fast growing social network when Dick Costolo came on board as its CEO in June 2010.  Since the beginning of 2013, Twitter quarterly MAUs have been growing at single digit rates, and have remained this way ever since.  Year-to-year growth rates have also been on a steady decline when Dick Costolo took over.  The following charts make this point very clearly. 

 

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I find it unforgiveable that Twitter's stock was rewarded with a nice "bump" (opened at $28 and ended the day at $48) when it went public in November 2013.  MAU quarterly growth rates were in single digits and the company has never generated a profit since it was founded in 2006.  Fast forward to today, and nothing really has changed.  MAU growth remains stagnant and another huge loss.  

Twitter really needs to make radical changes and this does not leave out the possibility of making a huge pivot in its business model.  When I say radical, I men possibly rebranding. This might include a name change, getting rid of the blue bird logo, and getting rid of "tweets."  

Twitter also needs to consider transitioning from a pure online microblogging site to a true social network.  This means giving Twitter a completely new look that's modern, slick, and cool, and offers more functionality and customization.    

I would also consider eliminating the ad-based revenue model, and going to a subscription based model for larger users.  I would not mind paying $4.95 to $9.95 per year depending on the number of followers and tweets and retweets I post.  If these changes are too radical for you, then I would recommend a mix of subscriptions and advertising.

Bottomline, Jack Dorsey needs to make Twitter easy and fun to use.  This is the only way to increase usage and engagement.  Increasing the length of tweets doesn't do it.  You need RADICAL changes to Twitter.  Sleep on that.  Comments gladly encouraged.     

Courtesy of an article dated October 27, 2015 appearing in Business Insider, an article dated October 29, 2015 appearing in Forbes, an article dated October 27, 2015 appearing in Marketing Land, an article dated October 27, 2015 appearing in Fortune, and an article dated October 27, 2015 appearing in Seeking Alpha

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TWITTER ANNOUNCES THAT JACK DORSEY IS NOW THE FULL-TIME CEO OF TWITTER, ADAM BAIN BECOMES COO

After much speculation, Twitter officially announced today that interim CEO Jack Dorsey, who cofounded Twitter and served as CEO from 2007 to 2008, has dropped the “interim” and assumed the role of CEO.

Adam Bain, who was Twitter’s president of global revenue and partnerships at Twitter, will become the COO. Bain was another candidate for the role of CEO.

Adam Bain is now Twitter's Chief Operating Officer (Click Image To Enlarge)

Dick Costolo, former CEO and board member, has also stepped down from the board. Dorsey will still serve as a member of the board, but is no longer Chairman. In a Tweet, Dorsey said they were “working to change the composition of the board.”

According to the SEC document detailing the changes,

“Mr. Dorsey was selected to serve on the Board because of the perspective and experience he brings as one of Twitter’s founders and as one of Twitter’s largest stockholders, as well as his extensive experience with technology companies.”

Dorsey will not be receiving any direct compensation for his role as CEO, per the SEC document.

Nate Elliott, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research, in response to this morning's news, says.  

"Now that Twitter's CEO drama is out of the way, the company can get back to doing its job: Building products people want to use.  The key phrase there is 'building products' - something Twitter hasn't done nearly enough of."

Elliott compares Twitter to Facebook, noting that the reason the latter continues to grow is partly due to the new features and experiences it continues to offer, attracting an ever-larger audience. He says.  

"Twitter is stagnating because its product looks almost exactly like it did when it launched ten years ago."

Forrester Research analyst Erna Alfred Liousas adds. 

"It's time for Twitter to build and innovate.  Not every new idea launched will succeed - but if it launches enough new features, some will surely find a wider audience. And a wider audience is exactly what Twitter needs."

Dorsey said in an investor call this morning.

“It’s our goal to exceed the expectations the world has for us.  I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Referring to a product road map for 2016 in the call, Dorsey referred to Project Lightning, which will provide users with curated content centered around specific events, embedded across the Web and within other apps.

Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, a mobile payment-processing company; he has no plans to step down from that role. Square is reportedly gearing up for an IPO this year.

Some think that Dorsey splitting his time between the roles may lead to ineffective leadership for both companies. Others have compared the move to Steve Jobs, who ran Apple and Pixar at the same time.

Dorsey announced he was taking the helm as full-time CEO of Twitter in a series of tweets:

Click Image To Visit Jack's Twitter page

COMMENTARY:   Twitter’s search committee originally said it would consider only candidates who could make a “full-time commitment” to the company. As CEO of Square, Dorsey seemed to be disqualified, assuming he also remained head of the mobile payments upstart. And yet some investors, like Chris Sacca and Keith Rabois, have since said publicly that they believe Dorsey has—and can—run both Square and Twitter effectively at the same time.  sey, previously fired from Twitter, as the full-time CEO at Twitter.  

RE/CODE reported correctly on Wednesday, September 30 that Jack Dorsey would become Twitter's permanent CEO and still run Square through its IPO:

"Jack is apparently back — for good this time.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has been serving as interim CEO for the past three months, is expected to be named the company’s new permanent CEO as early as tomorrow, although that timeframe may change, according to sources. Dorsey will apparently continue to run Square, the payments company he founded where he’s also CEO."

Here's what Business Insider had to say about this decision.

"Square, which will go through a roadshow (for IPO), then hit the markets, also needs a full-time CEO to guide it through its initial stages as a public company. 

For this reason, the timing isn't great for Dorsey to be Twitter CEO right now. 

Despite this, Dorsey is the best, if not only, choice to lead Twitter.

Twitter needs a product-oriented CEO that has the moral authority to tweak the product to make it appeal to the billions of people that don't use Twitter. 

Twitter needs an insider who already knows the company and won't need to waste a year, or more, figuring out who does what and who should be retained, or canned. 

Dorsey checks both of those boxes."

Brian Blau, an analyst who covers the major social media companies for Gartner, says.  

"Landing Jack Dorsey as the permanent CEO is the best choice the company can make right now. The company has been struggling and without a CEO in place... [it] would create even more disruption when Twitter needs the opposite and should be focusing on how they will transform the product and business."

Here's what Mashable had to say about Jack Dorsey's appointment as permanent CEO at Twitter:

"The appointment ends months of scrutiny and pressure from prominent investors and analysts for Twitter to move more swiftly in deciding on a chief executive who can provide stability and product leadership. Now he must accomplish what his predecessor Costolo could not: re-ignite Twitter's stalled user growth without alienating longtime users, or else convince Wall Street why Twitter warrants a $20 billion valuation if it can't hit the mainstream.

The stakes could not be higher for Twitter. Its stock has been stuck in the gutter for months, with rampant speculation that its best hope is to be acquired. Facebook is attacking Twitter's core on all sides with new features to track and broadcast news in real-time. And there is an army of unicorns (billion-dollar startups) ready and eager to snatch up talented but concerned Twitter employees."

New York Magazine had some interesting things to say about Jack Dorsey's ability to manage two companies simultaneously and the decision to take Square public:

"Dorsey has been aggressive —  but not necessarily successful —  in both roles. Square has rolled out some innovative features, but it’s a minnow in shark-infested waters, competing with Google Wallet and PayPal, which is now taking a bite out of Square’s mobile card reader market. Dorsey at the helm of both companies may hint at a future moments of symbiosis between the two. For instance, Twitter recently unveiled an option to donate directly to a political candidate on the platform, using Square to process the contributions.

Overall, both companies have suffered over the past year. Square has yet to find a profitable business model. And despite rumors that the company was attempting to sell itself off during this downturn, Dorsey recently filed documents for a public offering, a strategy that has drawn plenty of skepticism.

Twitter's stock has been steadily dropping, down a third this year and now standing below its IPO price. But Dorsey seems to see it as a buying opportunity: He recently purchased another $875,000-worth of Twitter stock. He made the move public in the most @Jack way possible, simply tweeting a link to the SEC purchasing document. One of Twitter's main goals is to get new users — many who are intimidated by the immensity of content produced on the website — to become devoted tweeters. It's something the company hasn't had too much luck with so far." 

As for myself, I remain somewhat ambivalent about the decision to hire Jack Dorsey as the permanent CEO at Twitter.  I agree with the comments made by New York Magazine.  Dorsey was fired before.  How much has Jack Dorsey changed since he was fired from Twitter?  Will anything really change?  Running two companies simutaneously would be an issue with me.  Steve Jobs did it, Jack Dorsey is no Steve Jobs.  Jobs completely re-invented Apple shortly after his return.  He even forged an alliance with Microsoft, his "Big Brother" nemesis, and allowed Microsoft to invest $100 million in Apple to keep them afloat.    

The move to appoint Adam Bain as Chief Operating Officer, is a good strategic move.  Jack will need an insider to manage Twitter's operations, allowing him the time to focus on making Twitter a better product for existing and new users.   

Jack Dorsey is obviously familiar with the situation at Twitter, but I wonder if he has the ability to move quickly and decisively to make the needed changes to the site that will make Twitter more appealing, interesting and engaging, and help keep users glued to the site, and attract new users as well.  

In response to the above criticism, Dorsey tweeted on Monday:

“My focus is to build teams that move fast, and learn faster.  We're working hard at Twitter to focus our roadmap on a few things we can make really great. Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily!”

Dorsey, however, has yet to prove himself worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Jobs. Unlike Apple -- or Facebook under Mark Zuckerberg -- Twitter and Square, where he is also CEO, remain relatively niche services with highly uncertain futures. 

If I were Jack, I would be polling users for ideas and determining why the other 600 million registered users, who don't use it at all, don't like about Twitter.  I would be talking to some of the experts and thought leaders in the field of social media to get their opinions about Twitter.      

Courtesy of an article dated October 5, 2015 appearing in MediaPost Mobile Marketing Daily, an article dated October 5, 2015 appearing in Mashable, an article dated October 5, 2015 appearing in Business Insider, and courtesy of an article dated September 30, 2015 in RE/CODE, and courtesy of an article dated October 5, 2015 appearing in MediaPost Mobile Marketing Daily MoBlog, and an article dated September 30, 2015 appearing in New York Magazine

WHY TWITTER WILL CONTINUE TO REMAIN IN FACEBOOK'S SHADOW AND WHY INVESTORS SHOULD NOT COMPARE IT WITH FACEBOOK

Twitter’s effort to find a new CEO is the latest struggle in a long list of challenges that the micro-blogging site has faced over the years. When the company launched its IPO in late 2013, Wall Street held out expectations that Twitter would one day rival social networking behemoth Facebook, which went public just 18 months earlier. But Twitter has stumbled and has yet to come close to rivaling Facebook on a number of key metrics and, more importantly, it appears increasingly unlikely that it ever will.

Twitter’s current travails are an interesting saga for a company that once was an Internet highflier and whose service is used by many notables including heads of state. But after a promising start, shares have tumbled below its IPO price of $26 per share as investors turned sour on the company. It did not help that some key executives have left, most recently its senior vice president of strategic investments, Mike Gupta, who also ran Twitter Ventures. Gupta follows other notable exits, including Rishi Garg, who led the company’s mergers and acquisitions team, as well as team colleague Jessica Verrilli, who is now at Google. The firm’s CEO, Dick Costolo, stepped down on July 1.

Click Image To Enlarge

The pressure Twitter is facing largely revolves around its closely watched monthly average user (MAUs) figures, which is a key metric because Wall Street considers it a harbinger of the firm’s future financial outlook. Since the first quarter of 2013, Twitter has increased its user base by only 19.2% to 304 million in the second quarter of 2015, according to the company’s earnings report. Facebook, however, has soared 35.5% to 1.49 billion monthly users during the same period, according to its financial results. Its growth is reflected in the stock price: Facebook shares have ascended 132% since its IPO.

Indeed, Twitter’s challenges include monthly average user growth and user engagement figures that look anemic compared to Facebook, as well as an inconsistent increase in advertising revenue. Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger says part of Twitter’s problem has been trying to uncover a strong revenue stream.

“In addition to ads, Facebook has much more data on its users’ preferences, which allows the company to target more effectively.”

Difficulty in using the service, as well as mediocre adoption by the mass market, are some reasons why Twitter’s user growth has not taken off, said Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial officer, during the company’s second quarter earnings conference call. He noted that Twitter does not expect to post meaningful user growth until it can offer more mass market appeal — something that will “take a considerable period of time,” according to a report by Evercore ISI analyst Ken Sena.

A reduction in user engagement on the site is also adding to Twitter’s challenges. During the second quarter, the ratio of engaged daily Twitter users to its monthly active users was 44%, compared to the preferred higher ratio of 48% last year, according to Sena’s report. Twitter’s Noto believes the micro-blogging site stumbled in the way it communicates to users regarding the value of using the service, according to a recent Reuters story.

Click Image To Enlarge

Although Twitter’s second-quarter advertising revenue reportedly beat Wall Street’s expectations when it soared 61% year-over-year to $502 million, investors were concerned that the company’s user growth may have reached its peak, which in turn could affect its ability to push advertising revenue higher, according to the Motley Fool.

In May, Facebook debuted its Instant Articles feature — a rich mobile news service that is expected to compete with Twitter’s Amplify. Sena noted that Facebook was responsible for 25% of referral traffic from more than 200,000 publications at the end of 2014, compared to Twitter’s 1%.

Apples to Oranges?

While it is clear Twitter’s monthly average user growth falls far short of rivaling Facebook’s performance, some question whether it was ever a fair comparison to begin with. For starters, Twitter’s product appeals to a more professional audience, whereas Facebook’s product has more widespread appeal, says Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions.

Twitter is primarily limited to news-related tweets and professional exchanges, whereas Facebook’s offering is broader and allows users to organize their photos and memories, Hosanagar says. As a result, he adds, the monthly average user growth numbers reflect the companies’ product positioning to a large extent.  Hosanager says.

“Given all that, there is no surprise in seeing Facebook’s superior numbers, and I would not necessarily blame Twitter’s management practices entirely. We just have to acknowledge that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.”

Dan Niles, a founder of asset management firm AlphaOne Capital Partners, points out that Facebook is primarily about sharing what users’ friends and family are up to, so it is a form of two-way interaction. Twitter, however, is more like another news source, so it involves primarily the passive consumption of content — a one-way interaction.  He says.  

“There are a lot of other news sources providing content in the world.  There are not a lot of competing social networks like Facebook.”

As a result, Twitter is unlikely to achieve the same level of user growth rates and engagement as Facebook. “[Twitter’s challenge] is not an execution issue, but rather an expectations problem Twitter ,” Niles says.

“Twitter’s expectations are out of whack with reality. It struggles with thinking it has to be as good as Facebook and Instagram, but they are not the same product.”

Consequently, some investors had high expectations that Twitter would become bigger than Facebook, which was a mistake to begin with because the two companies serve different purposes, he says.

Turnaround Tweaks

Innovation, the lifeblood of technology companies, could provide a path to redemption for Twitter as it hunts for its new CEO. Twitter co-founder and director Evan Williams told Fortune recently that the company’s next CEO should have the capability to form a definitive strategic vision for the company. Twitter’s engineers reportedly complained that former CEO Costolo was hardly a visionary.

Hosanager says.  

“I agree with Evan Williams’s view that [Twitter] will need a strategic rethinking.  That might involve repositioning Twitter as a crowd-sourced media company” — a risky move — or looking at complementary assets that will allow Twitter to better monetize its user base. I’d personally look into the latter. Specifically, what acquisitions will allow Twitter to learn more about its users and improve its monetization efforts?”

Facebook, for example, has a lot more data about its users than Twitter, which means it has superior monetization potential per user.   Hosanager says.  

“Twitter’s acquisition strategy has been more typical and lacking the aggressiveness or long-term view that Facebook has had.  Facebook has, in general, made several brilliant acquisi-tions. Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp are excellent examples. Even before one could say that these have potential to be Facebook killers, they were already part of Facebook. … Facebook has been aggressive and willing to pay huge sums to acquire these companies that could have been threats to Facebook in the long-term.”

Evercore’s Sena, meanwhile, noted that while Twitter’s platform does not generate as much revenue as one might imagine based on its scope of influence, the company is looking to address the Facebook challenge. That includes launching growth-building initiatives such as a new homepage to serve people who do not log in and Instant Timeline, which makes it easier to find people to follow. Twitter also has video apps such as Vine and Periscope. But the video effort still pales in comparison to Facebook’s four billion video streams a day, which is up four-fold from a year ago, the analyst wrote.

At least, Vine provides two-way interaction, similar to Facebook’s photo sharing site Instagram. Vine also has a following among millennials and teens, a target market with advertisers.  Niles says.  

“Vine is something Twitter should focus on.  Facebook is also focusing on videos, too, and video advertising.”

But even with Vine, Twitter is unlikely to beat Facebook.  Niles says.  

“Vine is more of a product and not a platform. Facebook is a great product, platform and company.”

A silver lining, though, is Twitter’s Google partnership, which is poised to help the micro-blogging site build up its user growth as tweets appear alongside search results, he adds.

But Niles raises the question of whether Twitter needs to be fixed at all.  After all, the company posted year-over-year revenue growth of 61% to $502 million in the second quarter.  Niles says, pointing out that Facebook grew 39% and the PC market’s revenues are shrinking in comparison.  

“That’s amazing growth.  Twitter has a great product, but people confuse a great product with a great stock.  If the valuation and expectations are too high, much like with Cisco’s stock back in 2000, it does not matter. The last time Twitter was at this stock price, it was doing $250 million in revenue.”

Revenue has now doubled, but not the stock.

Hosanagar says it is too early to be negative about Twitter.  He explains.  

“Twitter and Facebook are different products, and [it doesn’t make sense] to compare their growth and revenues.  I think Twitter has a good and viable business, but will likely be in Facebook’s shadow always in terms of the number of users and monetization per user.”

COMMENTARY:   I agree that it does not make sense to compare Twitter and Facebook user and revenue growth curves.  They are two entirely different platforms that serve different types of users. Facebook is more general purpose and serves a broad range of users.  Facebook is more of a general purpose communications medium between connected users.  Twitter, on the other hand, serves mostly professionals, celebrities and power users.  Twitter is a global newsfeed which is great for spreading news and information.  It's great for entertainment and sports, has often been used to analyze and measure where stock prices and voter loyalties are going in real-time.  Barack Obama was the first President to utilize social networks like Twitter to engage with his voter base.  Donald Trump is doing the same thing now, and this seems to be working well for him.

The biggest problem that I see with Twitter is that many users feel restrained with the 140 character limit placed on newsfeed posts.   Another problem is the massive volume of newfeed content.  It is impossible to read it all.   Twitter needs to provide users with built-in filters and search tools that present newsfeed information in an organized manner and pre-selected format.  Twitter Lists are useful, but provide only a minimal solution.

Another problem that has evaded Twitter: Actual profits continue to elude the service, however. It posted a net loss for Q2 2015 of $136.66m on gross revenues of $502 m, compared to a net loss of $144.64m for last year's quarter.  You have to believe that stockholders are becoming more impatient as each year passes by.

It has also been mentioned before that Twitter's revenue per user is highest in North America, but much smaller internationally, particularly in Asia, where revenues per user are about one-fourth those in the U.S.  

Courtesy of an article dated September 9, 2015 appearing in Knowledge@Wharton and an article dated July 28, 2015 appearing in The Register     

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TWITTER'S TOP SECRET "PROJECT LIGHTNING" USES EVENT TWEETS TO BRING CURATED AND VISUALLY IMMERSIVE CONTENT TO USERS

Twitter is developing a new major feature called "Project Lightning" that will use the concept of “events” to bring a curated and immersive experience to users, BuzzFeed's Mat Honan reports.

Dick Costolo is bouncing in his chair. He’s just vibrating. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, less than 48 hours before he will make public his resignation as Twitter’s CEO. And right now, he’s ebullient.

Costolo asks, excitedly, spinning side to side in his chair a bit.

“So, What did you think?”

Costolo is asking about Project Lightning, a major new feature for Twitter — and a new direction for the company that will launch later this year. Project Lightning will bring event-based curated content to the Twitter platform, complete with immersive and instant-load photos and videos and the ability to embed those experiences across the Web — and even in other apps.

Kevin Weil, who runs product for the company, says. 

“It’s a brand-new way to look at tweets.  This is a bold change, not evolutionary.”

It is also still a few months out, and things could change. But here’s how it will work.

On Twitter’s mobile app, there will be a new button in the center of the home row. Press it and you’ll be taken to a screen that will show various events taking place that people are tweeting about. These could be based on prescheduled events like Coachella, the Grammys, or the NBA Finals. But they might also focus on breaking news and ongoing events, like the Nepalese earthquake or Ferguson, Missouri. Essentially, if it’s an event that a lot of people are tweeting about, Twitter could create an experience around it.

Weil explains. 

“It’s around anything that’s interesting.  It could be current events. It could be breaking news. It could be awards shows or sports. But also cultural events and moments — things around your location and where you are. There’s amazing content, for example, posted to Throwback Thursday every single Thursday. But it’s hard to discover it; you have to work as a user to go and find the best stuff, but [we] can do it easily and can package it richly.”

Launch one of these events and you’ll see a visually driven, curated collection of tweets. A team of editors, working under Katie Jacobs Stanton, who runs Twitter’s global media operations, will select what it thinks are the best and most relevant tweets and package them into a collection.

These collections are designed to take advantage of images and videos associated with a particular event, and to bring them to life. None of that media is presented in the standard Twitter timeline — each tweet, picture, or video will take up the entire screen of your phone. You’ll view them one at a time by swiping. Importantly, collections will include — and thus promote — not only pictures and videos posted to Twitter, but Vines and Periscope videos as well.

All of these videos play automatically — and they load almost instantly. They just fire as you swipe over to them — that’s the idea, anyway.

You can click in and simply scroll through a curated event, and as you do a scrub bar along the bottom of the Twitter client tracks your progress until you either reach its end or catch up with tweets being posted in real time. So, for example, as you scrolled through tweets about the Super Bowl during the third quarter, the bar might start an hour or two before kickoff, and as you progressed through all of the curated videos and photos you’d eventually hit the most current, identified by a lightning bolt icon.

This BuzzFeed-created artist rendering showing how a final version of Project Lightning might look. Images and videos appear full screen as you swipe through them.  A timeline across the bottom shows you where you are in an event as it progresses over time. MIchelle Rial/BuzzFeed (Click Image To Enlarge)

What’s more, you can also opt to follow an event and have curated tweets blended into your timeline. And that doesn’t mean you follow accounts where those tweets originate. So, for example, while you might see Ellen DeGeneres’ tweets from the Grammys in a curated Grammys event, you would not actually begin following her if you were not already. When the Grammys end, so do the tweets. In other words, you automatically unfollow an event at its conclusion. And you can still experience curated events without following anything just by going to that center tab.

Finally, you can access these Lightning events on or off Twitter — whether you’re logged in, active, or not. You’ll be able to view them on:

• Desktop computers via Twitter.com.
• Mobile devices via its mobile apps.
• Even as embeds on other webpages.

If they are embedded off-site, the events will continue to update as more curated tweets are added.

Weil says.  

“There’s a beautiful connection to our strategy of reaching users on every platform.  It’s not just logged-in Twitter, it’s logged-out, and it’s syndicated on other websites and mobile apps. This reaches all of them. The collections are a core part of our logged-in experience — that’s the point of being in the center tab. But you can easily imagine them as logged-out experiences telling about something happening now out in the world. And you can imagine them — and this is new — as collections and syndicating them across any website or mobile app.”

That last bit is important because it’s a play to get Twitter in front of a lot more eyeballs. For the past year, as Wall Street has demanded user growth, Twitter has promoted the notion that what matters is not how many people use its service, but how many see tweets. Project Lightning is not just a way to reach more eyeballs; it’s also a gateway drug that Twitter hopes will convert those eyeballs into active users. More to the point, it’s a way to help people who might find Twitter confusing connect with events that are important to them and are also driving discussion on Twitter.

Stanton explains.

“We’ve seen in the past that we have so much conversation around events.  The Oscars, or the NBA Finals. Breaking news events like Ferguson. Memes like Alex From Target. … But the challenge we’ve had over the years is, although we have the world’s greatest content, it’s like having a television without a channel guide or even a remote control. There’s no way to really find it or contextualize that content. So [Project Lightning] is this beautiful vessel for us to surface great content and make it more delightful.”

To put them together, Stanton is building out a new media team of people in its major markets throughout the world, all of whom, she says, have newsroom backgrounds. They’ll use data tools to comb through events and understand emerging trends, and pluck the best content from the ocean of updates flowing across Twitter’s servers. But human beings will decide which tweets to include. That could put Twitter in an editorial position — deciding what to include and from whom — in a way it hasn’t really been before.

Stanton says.  

“We’re developing an editorial policy around those judgement calls.  We’re making sure that there’s fairness and integrity, and that we have a set of guidelines we can review before saying yes to that particular tweet or video and including it in Project Lightning.”

Twitter anticipates posting seven to ten of these events a day. But Costolo tells BuzzFeed News that the company intends to eventually open up the tool that it uses to build curated events to other organizations. So someday a publication focused on a niche interest like, say, sailing could create a collection around an event that might not be big enough to broadcast to Twitter’s entire audience, but would still be appealing to a niche demographic.

The idea for Project Lightning has been around for some time now. It began as a hack day project in January, and has been presented at multiple board meetings. BuzzFeed News learned about parts of the project and approached Twitter for more details, which were provided last week.

All of that seemed to be thrown into flux just a few days after the demo, when Costolo announced he was stepping down. But both Costolo and incoming interim CEO Jack Dorsey, the burly-bearded iCEO, insist Twitter remains committed to Project Lightning.

Dorsey said in response to a question about his commitment to the Project Lightning initiative.  

“Yes.  Yes, period. We’ve seen this at a few board meetings now, and I’m super excited about it, because it’s extremely engaging.”

The concept of Project Lightning is one for which critics have long clamored: an experience that lets people who aren’t hardcore Twitter users — or Twitter users at all — suck up the flow of real-time information without needing a deep understanding of Twitter’s product. It’s a way to show highlights of the news in real time as flows and crests. While that might be a feature that was many months in the making, it’s also, conceptually at least, something that should have happened years ago.

After all, Twitter has experimented with surfacing event-related content before, starting with its elections.twitter.com subsite in 2008 and continuing through this past week when it prompted users to check out the NBA Finals. But the company never managed to really nail a way for people who weren’t already invested in Twitter to get much out of its real time nature, and that certainly contributed to the drumbeat of critics calling for Costolo’s head. Could that be why Twitter is only now getting around to it?

Costolo, however, says Project Lightning is not a response to critics. He explains.  

“It’s been in the works for a long, long time.  I have no doubt that when it launches people will create a narrative that it was the result of something critical. People think I read something and then two months later we launched something — but that’s not the way this works. This has been in the works for months and months.”

And there are still months more left, too. While its videos may load and play in an instant, Project Lightning itself will have been a long time coming.

COMMENTARY:   Twitter management has known about Project Lightning since the end of 2014, and it is now almost July.  The Board of Directors loves the idea, so why isn't it alreay part of Twitter?  This is a great new enhancement to increase the user experience, and that could increase enagement and new users because of the ability to embed events outside of Twitter.  Embeded videos throughout the Web has greatly increased traffic and engagement on YouTube, and I think Project Lightning could have a similar effect.  However, Twitter should not wait until "later this year." to add this new feature.  It should be part of Twitter much sooner than this.    `

Courtesy of an article dated June 18, 2015 appearing in BuzzFeed

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TWITTER'S CEO DICK COSTOLO RESIGNS, JACK DORSEY NAMED INTERIM CEO, SO WHAT WENT SO WRONG? WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE NOW?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (far right) with Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams (left-to-right) during happier times during its successful IPO on November 7, 2013 (Click Image To Enlarge)

After years of user-growth struggles, Twitter announced that its CEO Dick Costolo has chosen to step down effective July 1, though he’ll remain on the board. Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey will be the interim CEO. 

The stock market initially responded favorably to the change, with Twitter’s share price up 7 percent in after-hours trading, but it now declined to just 3 percent up. That’s after its stock plummeted 18 percent six weeks ago following an earnings miss in Q1. User growth was up just 4.86 percent since the previous quarter to bring Twitter to 302 million users.

Twitter (TWTR|NYSE) shares rose 7% on Friday, June 12 the day after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced his resignation effective July 1 (Click Image To Enlarge)

Twitter held a conference call after close of the market with stock analysts right after Costolo's resignation announcement and said he initiated internal conversations about leaving at the end of last year, and that following discussions in Feburary and his decision to step down, Twitter decided to begin the CEO search. Costolo said he chose to leave now because he thought staying on through the CEO search would cause scrutiny to intensify. During the Q&A, Twitter execs said that since Costolo voluntarily stepped down, there will be no severance package.

Dick Costolo the outgoing CEO and Jack Dorsey the interim CEO held an exclusive interview with CNBC on June 12th 2015.

 

And on the topic of whether Twitter would consider being acquired, an exec said it wouldn’t rule that out, but that “we see no reason why we can’t [succeed] as an independent company." However, legally it can’t rule out acquisition offers and must review them, so that’s not really news.

Jack Dorsey, Square CEO, and Twitter Chairman and co-founder, will serve as interim CEO at Twitter until a permanent replacement can be found (Click Image To Enlarge)

Costolo, a former standup comedian, sent a tongue in cheek tweet “Welcome back, Jack.”  Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, tweeted “Calling my parents.” Twitter hired notorious crisis PR management firm Sard Verbinnen to handle the transition.

Dorsey will continue to be Square’s CEO, but will fill in for Costolo until Twitter finds a replacement. Dorsey was previously Twitter’s CEO before being forced out and replaced by co-founder Ev Williams in 2008.  Dorsey became Twitter’s executive chairman in 2011 when Costolo became CEO.

The CEO search committee is being chaired by the Twitter Board’s Lead Independent Director, Peter Currie, and includes early investor Peter Fenton and Williams.  Earlier this year, there was speculation that Twitter’s head of revenue and partnerships, Adam Bain, would take over if Costolo left the position. Others belive CFO Anthony Noto might make a good big bird.

In a statement to investors (in its entirety below), Costolo said:

“I am tremendously proud of the Twitter team and all that the team has accomplished together during my six years with the Company. We have great leaders who work well together and a clear strategy that informs our objectives and priorities. There is no one better than Jack Dorsey to lead Twitter during this transition. He has a profound understanding of the product and Twitter’s mission in the world as well as a great relationship with Twitter’s leadership team. I am deeply appreciative of the confidence the Board, the management team and the employees have placed in me over the years, and I look forward to supporting Twitter however I can going forward.”

Pressure on Twitter to get its product and leadership straightened out has intensified lately. That culminated last week in an 8,000 word essay by Chris Sacca @sacca, one of Twitter’s biggest investors, which detailed potential improvements that could boost growth and recover users who ditched the service due to poor onboarding.

Costolo will be remembered for many things, including a wildly successful time for Twitter’s monetization. However, last-quarter performance doesn’t a future cashflow make.  But unable to ensure user growth, investors worried about its long-term potential to offer the scale advertisers want.

Product innovation was considered painfully slow until Costolo recently promoted Kevin Weil to SVP of Product. He’s helped build fixes for some of the company’s biggest problems, including an easier onboarding flow and Highlights, which shows the best tweets you missed. But those changes could take time to produce real growth improvements.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tendered his resignation on Thursday, June 11, 2015, and will stay on board until June 30, 2015 when he will join the Twitter Board of Directors (Click Image To Enlarge)

Thursday’s announcement may have materialized recently, considering two weeks ago at the Code conference, when asked if he was worried about keeping his job, Costolo said

“I don’t worry about that at all. The board and I are completely in sync. Believe me, I don’t worry about that at all.”

That was a sly way to word it, because he knew he planned to step down.

Internally, sources say many employees loved Costolo. He brought order to Twitter when it was still in its chaotic adolescence, and turned it into a serious business.  Whoever comes next will have to transition Twitter from something for news junkies and public figures to a service the average person can love. At its best, Twitter can make anyone as smart as everyone, and that shouldn’t be a niche product.

You can see the full statement to investors below:

Twitter Initiates CEO Transition

 

Dan Niles from Alpha One Capital discussed the resignation of CEO Dick Costolo with CNBC:

 

Aljazeera discussed the resignation of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, its failure to meet stockholder expectations, the turmoil within the company, comparisons to Facebook, and prospects of Twitter becoming an acquisition target:

 

COMMENTARY:   I would've lied if I told you that Dick Costolo's resignation took me by surprise.  In fact, I could've predicted this outcome.  If you followed my previous posts about Twitter, you know I was very "Twitter-unfriendly," to put it mildly.  I could give you my reasons why the resignation was good news to me, but then I would've gotten into one of my crazy rants. Having said this, numbers don't lie, and here are four good reasons illustrated in charts as to why Costolo's days were numbered.

What went wrong at Twitter in four charts

Twitter’s share price proved to be the most reliable indicator of what investors want from Jack Dorsey as he returns to the top spot at Twitter, following the news that Dick Costolo, CEO, is going to step down from his post on July 1.

Shares jumped between 6 and 7 per cent following the announcement of Costolo’s departure, but moderated to just 2 per cent higher after Dorsey stated that there would be no change in strategy.

Ever since Twitter went public in November 2013, investors want reassurance that Twitter can grow its $23.5 billion market cap.

They’re looking for the next Facebook – but up to now, it’s not been clear that Twitter will take that mantle.

The pressure is on for Twitter to build products that will snag more sign-ups.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Comparison by Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of May 2015 (Click Image To Enlarge)

Twitter has 300 million monthly active users – around the same number as Instagram, but both are dwarfed by Facebook, which has 1.4 billion active users. It still has more active users than Google+, Instagram and LinkedIn – but only just.

Investors also want users that are engaged.

Facebook leads YouTube, Twitter and Instagram in Engagement (Active Users) As A Percentage of Total Internet Users (Click Image To Enlarge)

Over half of all internet users are signed up to Twitter – though less than half that amount are active users. Over 80 per cent of internet users are signed up to Facebook, by contrast, and about half of these are engaged.

Twitter still generated user growth for the year ending 2014, but they are less engaged than Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube (Click Image To Enlarge)

Over the last year, Twitter’s growth has been far outpaced by smaller sites like Pinterest and Tumblr – leading some to believe that if it doesn’t get its act together, it may yet be overtaken by its fast-growing competitors.

However it’s possible to be too focussed on user-growth as a key measure of Twitter’s worth.

Richard Windsor, a technology analyst at Edison Investment Research, said the biggest problem for Twitter is that it only serves a limited function for internet users. Edison research suggests that users can spend just 9% of their time with Twitter because Twitter has no service for many of the other activities that users carry out on their smartphones.

Windsor said.  

“For Twitter, the monetisation opportunity is fundamentally limited unless it can spread its wings wider and encourage users to spend more time in its services.”

Twitter seems to agree with this view. In his last quarterly earnings call, Dick Costolo said Twitter’s objective is to “build new applications and services in order to increase Twitter's utility around the world”.

Twitter missed revenue expectations for the Quarter ending March 31, 2015 and its shares tumbled by 18% following its earnings conference call with analysts (Click Image To Enlarge)

What Twitter Needs To Do Next

Having closely followed and blogged about Twitter before it went public, then analyzed Twitter's earnings and profitability since its IPO, and having been in the corporate world as a former CFO, it's not easy to produce a quick turnaround.  Having said this, Twitter needs to ask some hard questions about itself and implement strategies to increase user growth, user engagement, advertising revenues, and profitability.  Here are a few of those hard questions and some ideas.

Why haven't big advertisers taken Twitter seriously as an advertising platform?  

Twitter's problem all along as has been convincing advertisers that it is a viable advertising platform.  Twitter is not a pure-play social network like Facebook.  It's a newsfeed site.  Advertisers have continually compared Twitter to Facebook, and this is a mistake.  Twitter also has difficulty demonstrating to advertisers that they can generate a positive ROI from their marketing.  Marketers want proof that an ad on Twitter can drive the results they need -- whether it's having someone visit a website or go to a local store to place an order.

The engagement problem:  Twitter users are not very engaged.  At the end of 2014, Twitter had an estimated 950 million registered users, but only about one-third or 302 million are active monthly users (tweet at least once per month) as of Q1 2015.  There were 65 million monthly active users living in the US, its largest ad market.  The U.S. market generated 66% or $241 million in ad revenues in Q1 2015, yet Americans represented only 21.5% of worldwide monthly active users.  In another key Twitter metric, the US leads in average revenue per 1,000 timeline views at $5.85 compared to only $1.16 for international monthly active users in Q4 2014 (See Charts below).  

            Click Image To Enlarge

Click Image To Enlarge

In a study released in November 2013, it was found that only about 13% of monthly active users tweet at least once per month.  This means that in the U.S. alone only about 8.5 million of US and 39.3 million of worldwide monthly active users actually tweet. Those are terrible numbers for a social network that had about 950 million registered users and 302 million monthly active users worldwide at the end of Q1 2015.  Big advertisers have done the math and clearly see there are not enough eyeballs watching their ads on Twitter.  No wonder big advertisers avoid Twitter.  In a nutshell, Twitter is a terrible advertising platform.

In August 2014, Twitter openly admitted that up to 23 million of its monthly active users are automated tweeters.  In otherwords, tweets, responses and retweets have been automated using social media management software like TweekDeck and Twitter For Mac, and many others. Since a real person is not reading tweets in the newsfeed, this creates a monumental problem for Twitter, and advertisers have to factor this out of Twitter's monthly active user stats.  

Twitter Has A Content Relevance Problem

The vast majority of people using Twitter read posts by others. Unfortunately, according to some analyses, much of what flashes by is a waste, as the Washington Post has reported. Sorting through all the material to find what might be of interest can be a time-consuming challenge unless you have a feed open all the time, a time investment many aren't willing to make. Because it's in real time and voluminous, looking later at your leisure is difficult at best.  

If Twitter is to improve user engagement, keep existing users and attract new ones, it must provide filters that users can set to display tweets that are the most relevant to users.  Some users use the Twitter List feature to gather tweets from specific users, but this can also be a time consuming activity.  I read somewhere that a user had over 1,000 lists.  Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, scrowling through hundreds or thousands of tweets and reviewing lists are not the solution.  Filters are a better solution.  

Where are the ads?

I have just shown you that Twitter is a terrible advertising platform, so it should come as no surprise why you don't see that many ads on Twitter.  Compounding this problem are Twitter's advertising products which to say the least are a bit confusing. They are not called ads, but promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.  In my opinion, if you are going to run ads in a users newsfeed, you should have ADS, not something called "promoted....."   Ads should be unmistakeable and clear as mud.   Cutout the "promoted..." ad bullshit.  Twitteer should stick with banners (static or rich media), display, classified or video ads. This is the language and ad formats that are familiar with advertisers.  In my opinion, Twitter tried being a bit too cutesy with this "promoted..." ad bullshit so as not to irritate users and this has added to advertiser confusion.

Although Twitter has 237 million international monthly active users at the end of Q1 2015, the social site continues to have an international advertising problem.  Twitter has been slow to monetize its international userbase, selling ads in only about 28 countries to date. This may help explain why its average revenue per 1,000 timeline views was only $1.16 for international monthly active users compared to $5.85 for the U.S. in Q4 2014.  It should be obvious that Twitter needs to sell more ads in its international markets.

Why doesn't Twitter offer classified ads?    

Everybody is advertising something on Twitter, many of these ads are in the form of tweets selling followers or other useless crap you don't need.  These ad tweets clutter up the newsfeed and are quite irritating. These are CLASSIFIED ADS, and Twitter should begin making money from these ads.  It should ban ads in the newsfeed and setup a separate classified ad section with product categories by major geographic location like those offered on Craigslist.  Classified ads should stay within the 140 character limit of regular tweets.  With 302 million monthly active users, I think Twitter can give Craigslist, with 60 million monthly active users, a run for its money.      

Why can't Twitter generate a profit?

Twitter began selling ads about five years ago when it launched promoted tweets in November 1, 2010.  Twitter lowered its estimate for 2015, but says that it can generate $2.1 to $2.2 billion in revenues for the full year 2015.  This is serious money.  Any company that can generate billions in revenues should be profitable or at least breakeven.  In 2011, five months before Facebook had its IPO, it generated $3.7 billion in revenues and net income of $1 billion.  Twitter's CFO should take a long hard look at its operating expenses bring them more in line with revenues.  

The CFO should be asking these questions:  Why do I need to spend this?  Can we afford to spend less?   Should I spend more on advertising and promotions to increase Twitter brand awareness and increase registered users?  Do we need to cut staff?  How can I generate more revenues from existing users? No where in the press release that Twitter issued on Friday, June 12 following Costolo's resignation did I read about its strategy to turn the company around and make it profitable or at least breakeven.  Jack Dorsey, agreed with the current strategy left by Costolo.  The current strategy is NOT working Jack.  This is time for strong decisive action.  Jack needs to start cleaning up this mess.  Lay out a plan to stop the red ink.  Don't wait to hire that new CEO.  Okay, you don't want to do it?  Give me a month, and I will do it.  Call me now.  

The New CEO Must Change The Corporate Culture and Have Free Hand At Making Changes

As I pointed out earlier, I don't think that Jack Dorsey is a good interim solution for the reasons previously earlier.  He already has his hands full as the CEO at Square.  He's no Elon Musk.  The existing Board of Directors were all brought in by Dick Costolo, and the culture that now exists must be changed. There is only one female (Marjorie Scardino) on the BOD.  The new permanent CEO must have a free hand at making needed policy and strategy changes, bring in new management as needed, and replace members of the Board of Directors with trustworthy indiviuals with successful track records building companies and getting them through difficult and challenging times.

It may be that Twitter will never have the inherent mass appeal of Facebook, as Vox notes. The design of the service is wrapped around power users and celebrities and doesn't seem to appeal to the average person the way a number of other social networks do. Twitter's decling market value may make it an attractive takeover candidate.  The new CEO must take off the rose colored glasses and understand this coming in.       

Courtesy of an article dated June 12, 2015 appering in Fortune, an article dated June 12, 2015 appearing in The Independent, an article dated June 11, 2014 appearing in MarketingLand, an article dated February 18, 2015 appearing in Heidi Cohen blog, an article dated June 15, 2015 appearing in Inc., an article dated June 15, 2015 appearing in CBS News, an article dated April 14, 2014 appearing in CBS News, an article dated April 30, 2015 appearing in The Wall Street Journal, an article dated November 14, 2013 appearing in Digital Trends, an article dated June 5, 2015 appearing in DMR, an article dated June 10, 2015 appearing in The Motley Fool, and an article dated August 11, 2014 appearing in Quartz   

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THE STARTUPS GUIDE ON HOW TO GET MORE TWITTER FOLLOWERS

There are plenty of articles circulating the web about how to get more followers on Twitter, but when it comes to growing an account for a startup, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Why? Because if there’s anything I’ve learned since launching my business three years ago, it’s that startups don’t have many resources, i.e. people or money. That makes growing any social media account more difficult, but because of the nature of Twitter, it’s often considered the hardest.

Twitter isn’t a straightforward social network – there’s a culture that one must adjust to, a language to be learned, and unique etiquette rules to follow.

Let’s face it, Twitter isn’t easy.

But that doesn’t undercut it’s innate ability to become a branding channel, major lead magnet or powerful customer service channel. So when it comes to plotting out a strategy to get more Twitter followers for a startup, I tend to recommend a grass roots approach. This strategy can be used for any business, but if you’ve got the resources or money to spend, other routes may be easier or less time-consuming.

However, as an advocate for many of the old-school strategies, I can guarantee that the quality of these followers will be excellent. All accounts attract spam and deal with some of the more unsavory folks in the Twitter-sphere, but if you follow this guideline, those folks will be cut to the bare minimum, and you’ll be left with the cream of the crop.

1. Outline who you want to follow

I’m a massive fan of Twitter lists, and to be successful with the execution of this strategy, you’ll want to get specific about WHO you intend on following. By that, I mean listing out keywords for demographics, interests, hobbies, values, and topics that relate to your target audience

If you don’t already have a Ideal Customer Avatar for your startup, make one because it will greatly improve the keywords used to find people on Twitter AND they’ll likely follow you back. If you aren’t sure how to create an ICA, check out this great article HERE.

But you won’t just want to follow your target audience, you’ll always want to include influencers, businesses in your industry, competitors, industry news, and fun accounts to that list. Fun accounts can be folks who share quotes, humor or anything to add some spice into the mix. We want to be purposeful about who we follow, but allow for a diverse mix.

This list will aid in making sure that similar to the thesis of a paper, you stick to the overall goal of who to follow online.

2. Utilize Advanced Search

Once you’ve got a solid list together of WHO you want to follow, now it’s time to go start finding them. You can easily use just the Search function on Twitter to find lots of people with the list of keywords we created in Step 1, but to get really specific, Twitter advanced search offers many options for getting extra particular.

This comes in handy particularly when location is taken into account. You can search for local topics, national discussions or trending topics in certain areas. This can be huge for local startups who would like to start building relationships with local businesses and add the local flavor into their content stream with events and promotions.

But overall, Twitter advanced search can be utilized to search for discussions surrounding your brand name, its product or service, people who share your content or interact with you. Armed with the list built in the first step, you’ll never have a shortage of quality people to follow.

3. Bulk follow

Now that you’ve pin-pointed who you want to follow and where they are, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and start investing time into bulk following. To prevent this practice from being impersonal or unethical, make sure to utilize the keywords from the lists you developed, and take the time to read their Twitter bios of the accounts you’ll follow. My personal preference is to not follow people who don’t seemed aligned with the same industries as I am, have the same values or interests, or haven’t put time into their accounts. Mostly, I’m trying to make sure that I find quality people on Twitter who want to engage and get yappy with me.

This is the hands-on approach to growing followers that many tools handle for you, but if you follow the two previous steps fully before following people in bulk, you’ll keep the less quality follows to a minimum, which most tools can’t promise (except SocialQuant).

Plan out a specific amount of time to bulk follow per day, schedule it out on your planner, and stick to it.

And if you really want to be particular about who you follow, don’t just read bios, but click on accounts, check out the content they’re sharing, and if you click Follow, interact with some of it before heading off. Not only will that increase their chances of following back, but it will let them know right away that your account is being managed by someone who will interact.

4. Check out other Following lists

When I first got wrapped up in Twitter’s web back in 2009, there wasn’t a lot of information on the web about how to find the ‘right’ kind of people. Originally, I followed news organizations and celebrities because no one I knew was on Twitter yet. It took me a few months before I started finding accessible journalists, marketing professionals, and bloggers. And once I started finding real people whom I enjoyed, I began pilfering their Following lists to find other people to follow. And it was fantastic!!

When you come across an account that aligns with your brand and has a respectable amount of people they’re following, check it out and follow the folks that work for you. This can work perfectly with competitor accounts and will cut down on the amount of time spent locating people you’d like to follow.

5. Get involved with Twitter chats

If anything is exploding on Twitter lately, it’s Twitter chats, and they are an excellent way to find great people to follow. They offer the opportunity to talk about subjects of interest or that relate to your industry/brand and can introduce you to a whole plethora of new folks looking for the same.

Here’s a good source for all the available Twitter chats (click here), and if there isn’t one for your industry, I’d recommend starting one. Either way, choose one, jump in and share conversation with other folks – they’re highly enjoyable.

6. Tweet often, post consistently

If you want to find followers and get people to follow you back, then it’s going to be key that you establish your brand as credible and trustworthy. This is achieved by tweeting a minimum of 15-30x/day, and being consistent with that approach. Tweeting so often may seem crazy if you’re new to Twitter, but since it’s a drip feed of content, you have to have enough tweets to be relevant or no one will ever see you.

But consistency is the most crucial part of any social strategy. If you can only post a few times a day to start with, begin there and then add to it. Whatever is possible for you, make a plan and stick to it. If you show up consistently, other people will do the same. And vice versa.

7. Create Twitter lists

I spoke about my agency’s Twitter list strategy before, but in addition to those lists, and specifically for startups, I’d recommend creating these lists:

1. A list of people who interact with you. Make this a public list and any time someone interacts with you or your content, add them to the list. I’d suggest calling it something flattering, for example, ‘People Who Engage’ or something that gives them props for being engaged people on Twitter. They’ll be alerted once you add them, and will most likely follow you back.

2. A list of people in specific industries. Remember all those keywords I asked you to create earlier, group them into general categories and create lists for them. As you’re bulk following, you can add people to lists who you find additionally interesting or relevant.

3. A list of people from Twitter chats. This is a fantastic way to keep track of people who interact with you during Twitter chats and kind of give them props for doing so. Similar to the list of people who interact with your brand, it will give you a frame of reference as to who they are, and be more flattering for them.

8. Promote your Twitter account

This is like, duh, right? But is it really? We forget (even I am guilty of this) to promote our social channels and then people are unable to find us or don’t know how.

When you create a account for your startup and you want to get more Twitter followers, do a few things:

1. Write a blog. It doesn’t need to be lengthy, but discuss why you want to have a Twitter account for your startup, what type of content you’ll share, and who will be managing it. By writing a blog, you’re cementing this event in the history of your startup and creating content to share. Plus, the blog can be the long-winded version of what you hope to do with it. Are you aiming to make it your main customer service channel? Have conversations with users? Talk about it. And then share it.

2. Include the blog and news in your email newsletter. If you don’t have an email campaign set up, then I’m virtually shaking you, but hopefully you’re at least collecting emails. And a new Twitter account is worth telling your audience about. If you don’t tell them to follow you, they won’t, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And keep the spammy content to a minimum by letting them know what’s in it for them if they follow you, i.e. content, news, customer service, etc.

3. Add a Twitter button to your website and any other relevant sites. If you don’t make it easy for people to follow you on Twitter, it won’t happen. People are inherently lazy, which is why we need this promotion section on this blog to begin with. So we must make it easy for them to do so.  

4. Share the blog on your other social channels, create quote cards with your tweet handle to announce the news, and talk about the Twitter account often. Once isn’t enough in social media land, so strive to be creative with your promotions. In addition, you can cross-promote social channels, i.e. use a tweet for Facebook or vice versa.

However, do NOT hook up social channels so that the same content is flowing out of more than one account. If you post the same things on two accounts, chances are people won’t follow both.

9. Humanize it

You can follow all these strategies, incorporate fascinating content, and use the right Twitter marketing strategies, but if you don’t humanize your account then it will be tough to get people to follow you back. And let’s be honest, that’s what we want, right?

Startups have it tough because there’s so many popping up on the social scene, and instead of having a big smiling face in the profile picture, it’s a logo, and no matter how cool that logo is, people aren’t as interested in following logos. It’s harder to develop relationships with people online when working behind a logo, but it’s done everyday, it just takes purposeful work to humanize the account.

To humanize a social channel means to make it seem more human, personal, like you’re having a conversation with a friend or someone you know. On Twitter, this can be achieved by sharing content that describes the values of your brands, photos and videos from behind-the-scenes, quote cards to motivate, or questions that generate conversations.

The more often people see personal commentary in the Twitter stream, the more likely you’ll be able to get more Twitter followers.

What strategies have I left out to get more followers on Twitter? Or what works best for you?

COMMENTARY:   In an article dated March 23, 2015, Joshua Steimle writes about, "Four Things I Learned Getting My First 4,000 Followers on Twitter."  Steimle says.

"I haven’t bought any of my followers or engaged in any sort of trickery to boost my numbers. It’s all organic. The only “trick” I’ve found for increasing the number of followers I have, beyond simply being active on Twitter, is to follow others. It seems most people follow back when you follow them."  [Steimle included a graph which shows this relationship]

Steimle repeats what social media marketing consultant Murray Newlands had to say about how to get Twitter followers:

“You can get pretty sophisticated, or desperate, trying to get more followers on Twitter, but don’t forget the basics. Use hashtags (but not too many, generally a maximum of two), tag others (where it makes sense, such as to credit them as the author of a link you’re sharing), include links, images, and video, favorite and retweet others’ tweets, and engage in conversations on Twitter, you know, be social.”

Steimle stresses the importance of adding images to your tweets.  This is something I do religiously, so I agree wholeheartedly with him.  He says.  

"Tweet a line of text and maybe it will get favorited or retweeted, but probably not. Add an image to the same tweet, and engagement goes up steeply. Twitter’s own data says tweets with images get retweeted 35% more than tweets without them, so take a little extra time and include a good image along with that tweet."

Steimle points out the importance of using social media tools that can help drive more traffic to your website or blog or Twitter page and increase your followers exponentially.   He says.

"If you use Twitter more than here and there, check out Buffer. It has become my go-to social media management tool. Buffer’s primary feature is the ability to schedule tweets, which is useful for me since I live and work in Hong Kong most of the time, while my audience is still U.S. centric. With Buffer and some help from Moz’s Followerwonk tool I can schedule my tweets to go out at the optimal times for my followers, which happens to be while I’m sleeping. But Buffer also makes it easy to  tweet content whether on the desktop or mobile, including images with a simple right click."

Like Steimle, I have grown my Twitter followers organically.  I never paid for followers like others do.  I take the time to check the profiles and content being posted on Twitter by any new followers.   Just within the last three weeks or so, nearly three dozen new followers turned out to be individuals or firms selling followers for a price or peddling a service I don't need and no tweets other than a headline.  I blocked all of them.  I want quality followers, and so should you.  I want followers who clearly follow me for my content, and who I will follow back if I find them complimentary to my interests.  You should do the same.

Courtesy of an article appearing in SocialQuant and an article dated March 23, 2015 appearing in Forbes

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A LOOK BACK AT FACEBOOK'S OFFER TO BUY TWITTER, WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, THE TWITTER IPO, AND TWITTER TODAY

Facebook depicted as the enemy is pecked to death by an armada of Twitter "Blue Birds" (Click Image To Enlarge)  

In the early days of Twitter, founder Biz Stone says he turned down a huge offer from Mark Zuckerberg. It is now worth $23bn.

Twitter founder Biz Stone has told how he turned down a $500m (£290m) offer from Facebook to buy the firm – and watched as its value later soared to billions.

He told Sky News Digital View that on October 11, 2011 he and co-founder Evan Williams travelled to a meeting with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg several years ago.

Twitter Co-Founders (Left-To-Right):  Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone (Click Image To Enlarge)

Neither really wanted to sell the company, he said, so they decided to come up with a number "so big", that "no-one would ever say yes to it".

He said they came up with $500m, and "laughed so hard at that".

But despite Mr Zuckerberg saying it was a "big number", an offer was drawn-up later that day.

The pair turned it down, saying they felt like they were "just getting started" with the business.

He added that he did not get on with the Facebook founder.   He told Sky's Ian King.

"I like him, and I respect him, it's just that we didn't click.  I'm a jokey guy and he's a very serious guy so every joke I made – it was a tough crowd."

He also commented on the use of Twitter by extremists in Iraq and beyond, saying he still believed the social network was a tool for good rather than evil.

"When you create a large-scale platform where hundreds of millions of people have freedom of expression, you have to take the good with the bad.  If you're going to tout the fact you're encouraging free speech then you can't curate it. As soon as you do that you lose the trust."

He also said the growth of Twitter into a $23bn (£13.5bn) company feels "strange".  He said.

"I've come to terms with it but I wouldn’t call it surprised - it feels strange in a good way to go to the shopping mall and see the little bird I drew.  It doesn't seem that long ago that we were just a rag tag group of guys."

COMMENTARY:     

Facebook Tried To Acquire Twitter Twice

According to a report from a new book by New York Times writer Nick Bilton called "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal", Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to acquire Twitter on two separate occasions according to TechCrunch.

The book alleges that Zuckerberg first went through "official channels" before approaching Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey with a $500 million deal. (The price was Twitter's, not Zuckerberg's.)

Apparently, Dorsey took a meeting with Zuckerberg and suggested to the board that the deal would be great for Twitter.   The board disagreed and later Dorsey was pushed out of his chief executive position to a largely symbolic role. It was then that the other founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, had a meeting with Zuckerberg, too.

This was in October 2011, just before Twitter was a household name, so saying no to $500 million took some chutzpah -- or arrogance, but the board believed it was a "billion-dollar company." However, the rumor was that Zuckerberg told the Twitter founders that they needed to sell to Facebook or deal with a "clone" that his company would create and strangle Twitter in its crib.

The Road To Twitter's IPO

On October 3, 2013, San Francisco-based Twitter filed its S-1 prospectus for an initial public offering seeking to raise $1 billion. Twitter pegged the fair value of its common stock at $20.62 a share in August.  According to an unnamed source familiar with the IPO filing, this gave Twitter an implied book value of $12.8 billion based on the 620 million shares outstanding.   The share price was 28.6 times Twitter's annual revenues compared to Facebook's 26 times revenues and LinkedIn's 14.5 times annual revenues during their IPO's.

The following infographic tells everything you need to know about Twitter at the time they filed for their IPO with the SEC:  

Twitter -- The Road To The IPO (Click Image To Enlarge)

Twitter's IPO

On November 7, 2013, Twitter's had its IPO.  Shortly after the opening of trading, Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) shares rose 73 percent in a frenzied trading debut that drove the seven-year-old company's value to $25 billion and evoked the heady days of the dot-com bubble.

The stock closed its first trading day at $44.90 a share from the initial public offering price of $26 set late on Wednesday, falling back from a near-doubling in price at a session high of $50.

Click Image To Enlarge

Investor enthusiasm for the microblogging company defied traditional valuation analyses. The shares traded at about 22 times forecast 2014 sales, nearly double the multiple at social media rivals Facebook Inc and LinkedIn Corp, even though Twitter is far from turning a profit and posted a loss of almost $70 million for its most recent quarter.

Yet fans believed that Twitter, which boasted it had 230 million users globally and had revenues of $253.6 million for the first six months of 2013, and $316.9 billion for the year ending December 31, 2012, had established itself as an indispensable Internet utility, alongside Google Inc and Facebook, and that it has only scratched the surface of its potential as a global advertising medium.

Click Image To Enlarge

Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said.  

"When people use Twitter they are following certain people, they're searching for specific information.  There are powerful marketing signals that are almost Google-esque, something that Facebook doesn't really have."

The IPO was shadowed for months by Facebook's troubled 2012 debut, in which the shares quickly fell below their offering price amid trading glitches and subjected the company and its lead banker, Morgan Stanley, to accusations that they had been greedy in pricing the deal.

Twitter's opening appeared to go off without a hitch, prompting Anthony Noto, the Goldman Sachs banker who led the IPO, to write a simple Tweet: "Phew."

Still, Twitter found itself subject to the opposite criticism, that it had priced the shares too low and left more than a billion dollars on the table.

Ken Polcari, director of the NYSE floor division at O'Neil Securities, said.  

"In my mind they certainly could've raised the price on this thing and gone into the low 30s. From an outsider looking in I would say they were overly cautious because they didn't want a disaster on their hands ... I'm sure the company didn't want a Facebook debacle,  I get that, but I think they were overly cautious and it cost them some money."

Heavy demand for the IPO shares was apparent before the final pricing.  Market sources said investors had asked for 30 times the 70 million shares on offer in the IPO, representing about 13 percent of Twitter's outstanding common shares.

Twitter could've raised $2.1 billion if an underwriters' over-allotment had been exercised making it the second largest Internet offering in the United States behind Facebook Inc's $16 billion IPO in 2012 and ahead of Google Inc's 2004 IPO, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The NYSE, which snatched the listing away from its tech-focused rival, Nasdaq, marked the occasion with an enormous banner with Twitter's bird logo along its Broad Street facade.

Twitter executives including Chief Executive Dick Costolo and the three co-founders - Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey - appeared on a packed exchange floor to witness the debut.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (far right), and co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone (l-to-r) cheer as trading begings on the floor of the NYSE. (Click Image To Enlarge)

At current valuations, the stakes owned by Williams and Dorsey would be worth around $2.7 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively. Costolo, who invested $25,000 in the fledgling company in 2007, holds a 1.4 percent stake worth about $360 million.

They hefty valuations were cause for celebration for some insiders but they sounded alarm bells for some investors who cautioned that the froth was unwarranted.

Pivotal Research's Brian Wieser wrote in a note cutting his rating on the stock to "sell" from "buy". 

"With a price that pushes into the high 30s and beyond, Twitter is simply too expensive.  One way to justify a $45 price in our model would involve presuming that Twitter could generate more than $6bn in annual revenue by 2018. However, we think that would seem overly optimistic."

British actor Patrick Stewart, of Star Trek fame, rang the opening bell at Big Board together with nine-year-old Vivienne Harr, who started a charity to end childhood slavery using the microblogging site.

Stewart said, adding that he had only been tweeting for about a year.

"I guess I represent the poster boy for Twitter." 

In San Francisco

At Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, offices opened early and hundreds of employees flocked to the 9th floor cafeteria to watch the festivities on TV while eating "cronuts," a croissant-donut hybrid, made by Twitter's resident chef, Lance Holton.

The public debut was the latest milestone for a service that was born out of a nearly-defunct startup in 2006 and was derided by many in its early years as a silly fad dominated by people talking about what they had for breakfast.

But Twitter quickly began to penetrate popular culture in unexpected ways, with its open design and broadcasting format attracting celebrities, athletes, politicians and anybody who wanted to share short, punchy thoughts with a digital audience.

Its business potential developed more slowly, and the company appeared to be floundering as recently as three years prior to the IP, when it was riven by management turmoil and frequently crippled by service outages.

Under Costolo, who took over as CEO in October 2010, the company rapidly ramped up its money-making engine by selling "promoted tweets," messages from marketers that are distribute to a wide-ranging but targeted group of users.  In the third quarter 2013, Twitter made $168 million in revenue, it said, more than double the third quarter 2012.

The company said in its investor prospectus that more than three-quarters of its users were outside the United States.  Despite its early reputation as a hangout for Silicon Valley early adopters and tech geeks, some of its most active markets now include Japan, Indonesia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.

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The three most-followed accounts belonged to a trio of pop stars: Katy Perry @katyperry, Justin Bieber @justinbieber and Lady Gaga @ladygaga. (U.S. President Barack Obama @barackobama came in fourth.)

P.J. Crowley, the former U.S. State Department spokesman, said. 

"Twitter has, when coupled with the increasing distribution of smart phones and reach of the Internet, an impact on global connectivity and transparency.  It has definitely contributed to the acceleration of the news process and helped to expand the availability of information sources to a wide range of people."

The 140-character messages have spawned an Internet culture of its own. The "hashtag," a pound symbol devised by early Twitter users to denote the topic of a conversation, has became ubiquitous, with the word even becoming an ironic expression parodied by the likes of "Saturday Night Live."

Sell Rating

As Twitter's stock soared after the opening, the company's market value, including restricted share units and other securities that could be exercised in the coming months, was over $28 billion.

Fund managers who got small allocations at the IPO were hopeful the stock would trade down after Thursday's pop.

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Mark Hawtin, portfolio manager of the GAM Star Technology Strategy, said.

"We have a target of $40 and we won't buy more as long as it is trading above that."

Jerry Jordan, manager of the $48.6 million Jordan Opportunity Fund, who got a small allocation, said he would buy more of Twitter if it trades down around $30-$35.  

Jordan said.

"A lot of these sexy IPOs have a big pop on the first day and then they grind sideways." 

Twitter's successful debut is likely to stoke interest in other up-and-coming consumer Internet companies such as Uber, Pinterest, Airbnb and Square, all of which boast private-market valuations well north of a billion dollars and could go public in the coming years.

Still, two early social media success stories, Groupon Inc and Zynga Inc, have suffered major reversals since going public last year. Groupon, despite big gains in its shares this year, still trades at less than half its 2011 IPO price. Zynga is worth about a third of its 2012 IPO price.

And first-generation social media firms such as MySpace have all but vanished as fickle users moved on to the next big thing.

Twitter Today

On April 29, 2014, Twitter released its first quarter financial performance, reporting revenues of $250 million for the quarter, a net loss of -$132.4 million, and earnings per share of $0.00 on a non-GAAP basis.  The street had expected Twitter to report revenue of $241.5 million, and a three cent per-share loss.

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That non-GAAP $0.00 EPS is slightly occlusive — the company in fact had non-GAAP net income of $183,000 in the period, or about the cost of one engineer’s yearly cost to a tech company. However, when you stretch $183,000 across more than half a billion shares, it doesn’t go far.

Twitter’s revenue is up 119% year-over-year. On a GAAP basis, Twitter lost a stunning $132 million in the period. That amounts to a GAAP net loss of $0.23 per share.

Twitter Net Losses Pile-up

Twitter has yet to generate a net profit in any quarter since it began operations.  For the years ending December 31, 2013, December 31, 2012 and December 31, 2011, Twitter reported net losses of -$645.3 million, -$79.4 million and -$164.1 million respectively.  Twitter also reported a net loss of  -$132.4 million for the 1st Quarter ending March 31, 2014.   All together, Twitter is carrying cumulative net operating losses of $1.127 billion since it began operations in 2006.  

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Twitter Operating Expenses

Twitter operating expenses during the 4th Quarter 2013 were a record $752.4 millon -- exceeding the combined total of $548.4 million spent during first three quarters of 2013.  Most of this went into research and development (R&D) and sales and marketing expenses.    These two constitute the majority of Twitter’s operating expenses and stood at a combined 62.5% of revenue in 2013. 

Twitter’s R&D expenses as a percentage of revenue has come down from a massive 91.7% in 2010 to about 32.2% in 2013.  However, the figure stood way above Facebook’s 9.6% which suggests that the company has a long way to go in terms of improving monetization and reducing the cost burden. 

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Twitter’s sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue increased from 21.4% in 2010 to about 30.3% in 2013 as it ramped up its sales force to sell ad inventory slots and acquire customers. In comparison, the figure for Facebook stood at around 10.5% during the same year.

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Twitter reported that it had 255 million monthly active users. In the sequentially preceding quarter, Twitter had reported 241 million monthly active users. That’s growth of 14 million in the three-month period, or around 5.8%.

Twitter Monthly Active Users

While sharing its financial results for its first quarter 2014, Twitter announced a number of new milestones that showed the service’s user growth has slowed while its mobile advertising share has grown.  The social network has now passed 255 million monthly active users, 198 million of which were monthly active mobile users as well.

The company’s monthly active user count has only grown 25% in the past year. Monthly mobile active users have grown by 31% in the past year.  However, this growth remains modest.  78% of Twitter’s users access the site from a mobile device.  Investors appeared concerned that despite quickly expanding revenue, Twitter’s days of massive user growth were over.  That meant lower future top and bottom line growth.

Twitter Share Prices

When Facebook went public in May 2012, the company's shares were priced at $38. On the first day of trading, the stock price didn't jump as anticipated and would likely have fallen below the IPO price of $38, if the IPO's underwriters hadn't stepped in to support it. In subsequent weeks though, the share price quickly fell below $30 and continued to slide for months. It took the stock more than a year to return to its IPO price, clearly indicating that the IPO had been priced too high by Facebook's underwriters.

18 months later, Twitter, having witnessed first hand how hard Facebook's reputation had been hit by its disappointing IPO, was desperate to avoid making the same mistake as its big rival. The company's IPO was priced at $26, which was above its initial price range, but still modest according to many experts who anticipated massive demand for Twitter's shares. When Twitter finally made its trading debut on November 7, the share price jumped more than 70 percent, creating a lot of positive press for the company. The fact that Twitter's shares have continuously traded above $40 since the IPO and are currently approaching $50 indicates that conversely to Facebook's IPO, Twitter's IPO was significantly underpriced.

In the end it seems that Twitter avoided Facebook's IPO mistake, overpricing, by making another mistake, underpricing. To figure out which is worse, one needs to remember what the goal of an initial public offering is. Normally, a company goes public in order to raise money that can be invested in the company's growth. By pricing its IPO very high, Facebook squeezed every dime out of the investors waiting eagerly to get in on the hottest IPO of all times. The company ended up raising more than 16 billion dollars in return for lot of bad publicity and some disgruntled investors. Twitter chose the opposite route. Selling 80 million shares at $26 a piece, the company raised $2.1 billion when it easily could have raised more. Assuming a possible IPO price of $40, Twitter left more than a billion in investment capital on the table or rather in the accounts of its early investors. Twitter sacrificed that money in return for a lot of goodwill, but filling the pockets of banks and investors has never been the purpose of an IPO. So in the end, by avoiding Facebook's mistake, Twitter may have made an even bigger one: losing out on a billion dollars worth of additional capital.

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Twitter's share price has been on a steady decline since the start of 2014.  Twitter shares peaked $73.31 on December 26, 2013 and ended the year 2013 at $63.65 per share.  Twitter shares hit a low of $30.66 on May 7, 2014.  Twitter's share price has rebounded some since its low, and ended at $37.84 at the end of trading on July 10, 2014.

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Twitter Revenue Forecasts for Q2 2014 and Full-Year 2014

Twitter expects its second quarter revenue to come in between $270 and $280 million. Full year 2014 top line should be between $1.20 and $1.25 billion, coming in on the low end of expectations.

That aside, Twitter’s $2.2 billion in cash and equivalents is right where it was before the quarter started, meaning that the company has plenty of runway to execute on whatever its plans may be.

Conclusions and Ending Comments

I am really disappointed in Twitter.  From the size of its R&D and sales and marketing expenses, I see a public company that is still trying to develop a predictable and successful business model. This is a company went to public much too soon, but in hindsight chose the IPO route to take advantage of the recent popularity of social networks going public, and the success of Facebook in monetizing mobile and rising share price.

Facebook was able to successfully monetize desktop users, then quickly switched its platform to successfully monetize its rising mobile users.  Facebook was able to do this, and it did this quickly, with much success, and has been rewarded by Wall Street and Main Street investors with a stable share price.  

I am not too sure that Twitter will be able to repeat the success of Facebook, and prop up its share price to its high of $73.31 in late 2013.   For one thing, Twitter users were already predominantly mobile, and it has monetized them with its line of "promoted" advertising products.  However, how much more can it squeeze out of those mobile users.  

User participation is also a huge issue with Twitter.  Less than 5% of Twitter users actually tweet on a regular basis (once a day).  So what if they have 255 million monthly active users. Only 5% of them are active on a regular basis.  The recent Twitter redesign may help increase user participation, but not without giving users an incentive or sense of urgency to tweet.  The limit of 140 characters per tweet really limits user participation.  Facebook places no such limit on user timeline posts, and this is a huge competitive advantage.  It is no wonder that average revenues per user are one-fifth of Facebook.                

Courtesy of an article dated June 10, 2014 appearing in Sky News, an article dated October 4, 2013 appearing in Bloomberg, an article dated November 5,  2013 appearing in NBC Bay Area, an article dated November 7, 2013 appearing in Reuters, an article dated April 29, 2014 appearing in TechCrunch, an article dated March 13, 2014 appearing in Forbes, an article dated April 29, 2014 appearing in the TNW Blog, and an article dated December 10, 2013 appearing in Statista

 

TWITTER AND STARCOM MEDIA VEST GROUP RESEARCH SHOWS THAT TWITTER IS HELPNG TV AD CAMPAIGNS

Twitter wants to be the first choice for your second-screen. And today, it released research that backs up its aspirations.

The study, a product of Twitter’s Social TV Lab partnership with media buying agency Starcom MediaVest Group, presents evidence that combining Twitter and TV results in strong gains in brand awareness, TV ad recall, engagement with television shows and sales lift.

Twitter and SMG wrote in a release.

“Results confirm that social TV is here and the opportunity to use it to enhance and amplify brand experiences is only getting bigger.  Thus far, lab results demonstrate that Twitter’s ability to amplify significant cultural moments, far beyond original broadcast audiences.”

The Social TV Lab findings, compiled from various sources, including Nielsen’s Brand Effect for Twitter, Datalogix’s matched household modeling, Twitter’s in-tweet surveys, looked at results for campaigns from 15 U.S.-based SMG clients as well as general social TV engagement.

The results present a counterpoint to skeptics such as the NBCUniversal executive who earlier this year said social media doesn’t drive TV ratings.

Although the issue of TV ratings wasn’t addressed explicitly, the study found that people who use Twitter while watching TV are more engaged with shows and advertising, and therefore more valuable to marketers, than people who watch without Twitter.

Here are the main findings and an infographic by Twitter and SMG:

1. Twitter + TV = Increased Brand Awareness vs TV Alone. For brands that used Twitter alongside their TV advertising, the study found on average a 6.9% increase in awareness for exposed audiences and significant increases for exposed and engaged audiences across awareness, intent and favorability measures.
2. Twitter Amplification = Sales Lift. For the brands that measured sales impact, we saw sales increases of 4% on average in households exposed to ads on Twitter and TV vs just TV ads alone.
3. The Twitter / TV Multitasker is Here – and TV Ad Recall is High for them. Only one quarter of tweeting occurs during the ad break, and it was highest during reality shows (27%). This supports existing Twitter research that found viewers who are actively engaging in social media while viewing TV are genuinely paying attention to both screens as TV show tune away is less and ad recall was higher for TV Twitter multitaskers. Our results found that television ad recall was also 13% higher among Twitter users versus non-multitaskers.
4. Real-Time TV Content Engagement is on Twitter. Tweeting about events/shows is higher (20%) than “general browsing” about a specific event/show (15%.) In addition, most tweeting happens when something in show/game/ad is worthy of a tweet (70%).

SMG CEO Laura Desmond said in a statement announcing the findings.

“Twitter, in a very short period of time, has gone from experimental to essential and there's no better place for marketers who want to reach both influencers and their followers during the biggest live, public and conversational moments.”

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Courtesy of an article dated June 17, 2014 appearing in Marketing Land