Usage Stalls for Twitter; Shares Drop
nytimes.com
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I don't need innovation, I just want it to work sensibly. I stopped using twitter on my phone because I found it distracting. I decided to try and use it on the web only, but there are two really big problems I see.
1. Each and every time I login, it doesn't remember where I left off, so I have to scroll down to about where I think I was and go from there.
2. Once in a while, I'll leave it open, then see the notification "xx new tweets." I then click on that and it takes me to the most recent tweet, not where I was in the timeline before I loaded all the new tweets.
I can't figure out if these are really big oversights or I'm not using it as it was intended. As it is, it certainly isn't a consistent experience with the mobile client.
And to echo parent's complaint, god forbid you accidentally click a link; you lose your place in the tweetstream and have to hit back then scroll again.
I can't imagine anyone at twitter actually uses the mobile site; problem #1 is particularly frustrating.
Also, some time ago, when you clicked a message to view it's context, Twitter would expand the message list inline. Now it takes you to a new page and when you return you're back to top.
When they did that twitter for me went from a thing i had running all day on a second screen to a thing i look at whenever it emails me that someone talked at me.
It may not be dead, but it's barely got a heartbeat.
Twitter is a nice real time pulse on what the entire internet is up to. Tweetdeck is a decent way to get a feel for how things you are interested in are trending. But "decent" is the keyword here, Tweetdeck really isn't great at this at all. I still have no really good way to aggregate large numbers of tweets, find out what the current buzz is from that, then drill into specifics as I see fit.
After all these years I still think Twitter is just noisy and mostly a waste of time. I'd love for them to change my mind.
Beyond that, I completely agree. I couldn't give a damn about someone being somewhere eating something. Or what the CEO of Oracle said this week.
- Main timeline screen: you can swipe left/right for your time line, discover and activity. It is bad UX choice when you try to read your timeline with one hand scroll down the page. Many once in a while your swipe down gesture will trigger the swipe left/right and is utterly annoying.
- It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is displayed as link and not shown.
- The load more tweets implementation is broken. After tapping "Load More Tweets", it brings you to any tweet in your timeline, and you are lost to where were before.
- It does not support GIF natively.
Other issues:
- Follow named brands are a waste of time on Twitter as they repeatedly tweet the same news.
- Twitter is major pain-in-ass email spammers. There are 7 email notifications type you receive from just Twitter for marketing. The options should be off by default. Why give users a chance to hate you?
Irony is Twitter is pushing to be the mobile app platform of choice but they don't have the best mobile client.
This is because of Instagram/Facebook and not Twitter. IG/FB chooses to drive the traffic back to their web property rather than embed the images in Tweets.
It reminds me of Atheism+'s Block Bot which had people's accounts blocked because, once some enlightened atheist plus added that account to their block list, then all the bots' subscribers added it to their's automatically, triggering Twitter's account blocking feature.
To fight against trolls, maybe Twitter shouldn't have public messages anymore and, instead, only allow users to view messages published by people who they follow and people who these people follow, like Facebook's friends and friends-of-friends. This way, if a troll publishes crap about you, only the people who follow that troll and their followers will see them.
Twitter is a native / highly fluent english speaker.
People say that Facebook would survive against Twitter because it's such a different service (e.g. people are not capable of saying what they want to say in just 140 characters). However, In my experience, people are capable of adapting. People are quick to try new things. People go where their friends go and when a service loses it's shine and and starts doing things that are un-cool, people move on.
Twitter is one of the few big websites and apps I use regularly which I can honestly say the design and UX has gotten far worse over the years.
Search on Twitter has always been a horrible struggle. If I want to follow a friend I know personally, I have to carefully and exactly type their handle in. I could try to type in their name or username, but again I'm left doing the heavy work sorting through 90 John Smiths. Why can't Twitter order people search results taking in consideration the people I follow?
Don't even get me started on Direct Messages. Insanely bad.
More an more my Twitter feed resembles my current Facebook feed, full of advertisements, clickbait, and crap I just don't care about, stuff that isn't interesting. And it's not coming from exclusively the people I follow.
Twitter was supposed to be a messaging platform. They lost that war, big time. Twitter became a heavily one-sided broadcast platform instead. As the WhatsApp etc. world eats Twitter's usage, all they'll have left are heavy broadcasters, celebrities, and so on (and those people will abandon the increasingly unpopular platform).
The reality is, Twitter doesn't serve enough of a stand-alone purpose any longer. Too many pieces of its value have been stolen away by competing products. Not to mention, nobody really cares about their social network on Twitter, there's minimal value to that (versus eg Facebook), so there's next to no barriers protecting them from erosion in that regard.
Simply put: Twitter isn't the best social network; Twitter isn't the best at photos / images / media / video; Twitter isn't the best blog platform; Twitter isn't the best messaging platform.
It's not the best at anything, and it will lose in part because of that.
I suspect this is because, in their case, Instagram is personal. You post pictures of what you're up to and you're always up to stuff. Twitter seems more for business, building a brand or talking about news. Those are things you might cull if busy, or if you change jobs or don't have the energy to promote.
And because the community tools are so meagre (flat comments, for one), Twitter maintains minimal goodwill with its users. I feel like if I could take my Twitter ecosystem with me to another service, I would. I don't feel that way about Instagram - it works largely as I need it to work.
FWIW, I use the official OSX and iOS apps but no longer touch the web version at all.
It generated $1.77 for every thousand timeline views in advertising revenue,
up 83% form (sic) the prior year's rate [3]
[2] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=...
[3] http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/27/twitter-inc...
they've been operating w/ a net loss since (probably) forever
Operating income:
2013: -$635m; 2012: -$77m; 2011: -$127m
Net income:
2013: -$645m; 2012: -$79m; 2011: -$128m
The same general result holds true for their most recent quarters. They're losing tons of money and vaporizing cash.
Most likely they're going to get severely squeezed when the easy money party ends / the stock market falls. They better either be profitable at that point, or have a back-up plan. They certainly wouldn't be the first dotcom cash burner to get crunched when the easy money stopped flowing.
look at their 2013 annual report, page 41 [1]. $841m cash, $1.391B short term investments, $2.35B working capital. They appear, to my reading, to be cash flow positive. Cash flow positive businesses tend not to go out of business. Again, from their 3Q report:
As of September 30, 2014, cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities
were approximately $3.6 billion, compared to $2.1 billion as of June 30, 2014 [2]
[1] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/357857396...
[2] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=...
They had 1.2B for funding, then they IPO'ed, then they even made some weird stuff like [1] (which looked like a really desperate 'running out of cash' decision to me), sum all of that stuff up and you can easily explain those 3.6 billion plus all the other money that they had burn.
Sure they won't go out of business soon, but they will when all that money's gone. Twitter will be the flagship example of the second dot-com boom.
And they deserve it, so many wrong business decisions during these years that you start giving Thiel's pot-smoking theory a good chance.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2014/09/12/twitter...
Then there's the issue of fake likes or paid likes that fall outside your campaign specifications. You pay for likes from the US and get a barrage of likes from Bangladesh.
The next issue is engagement. People like pages because they like the pictures or something else in the ads. After that they have zero engagement with the page.
This, coupled with limited reach of posts on your page, means that your posts might reach a bunch of people who are utterly irrelevant to your mission (Bangladesh) or absolutely disengaged (love the pictures). We advertised for a page, reached hundreds of thousand of people and received a real education as to the minefield that FB can be. I am absolutely convinced that the same amount of cash would have produced vastly better results had we spent it on Google ads. We would end-up with a list we could communicate with, groom and grow rather than a page with people who's relevance, targeting and engagement are in question. And, to add insult to injury, we have to pay dearly to reach with each and every message.
Yes, to answer the question, we are transitioning our list away from FB as quickly as possible and will not advertise at all after that. Live and learn.
We've heard that Twitter can be far better than FB in many regards in terms of reaching and connecting with your audience. I'm sure we'll learn all about that in the next few months.
May i ask you where and how are you transitioning your list away from FB?
How: Well, we are spending money to reach our page likes through FB ads and make a compelling case to have them go over to our site and register. It's not easy. My guess is that it might take up to six months to get all the people who are willing to get off FB for a better experience.
It's not about spamming them but it is about being able to reach them and engage with them. So, at some level, we only want the people who are actually willing to click away from FB and go through the trouble of registering on our site. If they do that chances are they will actually engage and they'll also be more receptive to our message. That makes it all far more efficient.
If you have a FB page with 50,000 likes you might not reach more than 5% --if that-- with any update you post to your page. There is no way to blast an update to your entire list. Not even in a staged manner. Meaning: Send this update to people who liked this page at a rate of 1,000 per day for 50 days. If you want to reach those who liked your page you have to pay. Over and over and over again with every single post you want to reach your audience through the "boost" process.
FB is clearly telling you they own your audience. I have to deeply disagree with that. FB does not own the audience that likes, say, the Ford, Audi, Coca Cola or Victoria's Secret pages. Those companies worked very hard and spent lots of money to build and capture an audience. FB is effectively hijacking your audience in an attempt to make money with every message you want to send them. I really hope companies recoil at this in a big way and the whole thing backfires on them. It's wrong.
Beyond that, list management is horrid. For example, we wanted to delete nearly 1,000 likes we got from Bangladesh, India and a few other places that had no real relevance or connection to our products. Not sure how they got there because our advertising for page likes clearly defined a US-only audience. One theory I read about is that page like click farms tell their employees to like a wide variety of pages in order to hide the likes-for-hire activity. Anyhow, the ONLY WAY to maintain your list is to use the banning interface and ban each and every user you don't want ONE AT A TIME. You can't even click a bunch of check boxes and then apply an action. You can't export to CSV, mark them and then upload to clean-up your list.
So, you write a post, it only reaches 5% of your audience and, by random chance, a bunch of them are from corners of the world that have no relevance whatsoever to what you are doing. It's a royal mess and a total waste of money.
I am sure there are many who are doing well with FB ads. I am sure these are very specific use cases that might be so lucrative that paying for noise in your likes and paying to reach the audience over and over again might not be a problem.
Oh yes, and then there's the issue of the dumb-ass rules for ads and the even dumber software that checks against those rules. My favorite being the 20% text rule. It is so unreliable that you can actually run an ad, have it approved and half way into your campaign get a message telling you that the ad was disapproved due to violating the 20% rule.
The software they are using to check against this is using some kind of crazy voodoo that works half the time. The other half of the time it confuses text on, for example, a product with text outside of it. That's why you end-up seeing ad after ad on FB with stupid stuff like a landscape or a bird flying or whatever, because you can actually try fifteen different generation of ads with text and have every single one of them rejected when the text doesn't even approach 20% usage.
Then there's the absolutely terrible feedback when ads are rejected. No reason at all given in most cases. So you have to guess. Is it the 20% rule? Is it the nature of the image? Is it the text in the comment? Is it the link? Is it the call to action? Is it the page it links to? Is it the subject matter? Is it the color of the background? Is it the capitalization? What is it? So you are left guessing with no feedback and NOBODY to contact, even with smoke signals.
We had one horrible case of launching a single day discount offer through an ad on FB. A website was built and all related systems and software were in place weeks in advance. The FB ad was put together and staged a week in advance. Approved. The day of the offer the ad turned on and started to run. No more than 15 minutes into the 24 hour run it got kicked out for "violation of TOS". What? We sat there trying to figure out what the heck was going on. We submitted updates at a furious rate to try to shotgun the problem and see where it was. We changed the description, the link the text, the words, the image, the background. We changed everything. We took a beautiful and turned it into the most disgustingly bland thing you've ever seen. Nothing. Nothing could make the ad gain approval. We burned sixteen hours chasing after this. The promotion would have been a complete bust if we hadn't reached out to AdWords and run a bunch of ads about six hours into this mess.
We somehow filed a support case with FB. FOUR DAYS LATER we get a message basically saying "Sorry, the ad should have been approved. There was nothing wrong with it. Probably a glitch somewhere. Try again next time."
To say I blew a fuse is the understatement of the year. FB Ads might just make this work because of their scale. I don't know many companies in the real world that could behave like this, have such shitty customer service, performance and reliability problems and survive. We'll see what happens. I am certainly not sending them any more of our money once we get our customers away from their clutches. They are OUR customers, not theirs.
Most of the FB experience I am describing applies to the consumer products.
Twitter has been pretty great for the lab I'm at. We wrote some code that looked for search terms, and then based on words associated with feelings or intent related to the term, we send people a message with a link to get them to go where we want them to go (to sign up for a service/app related to their search term, and gives us more subtle experience sampling data compared to typical psychological studies). We're actually planning on using it to recruit for a larger study soon. It's kind of amazing the kind of engagement you can get from bot's reaching out to people.
Google remains desperate to play in the social world, and they have a very high specialty at monetizing text.
Comically Google would end up buying Twitter on the way down, were they to buy it, leaving them with another social disaster.
Whenever I got stuck on some unusual traffic jam I could have just open twitter and immediately see what was happening and sometimes even get some piece of advice like 'take this other route instead' that was very valuable for me. I wouldn't had mind to see a few ads along there or even pay in exchange of that service that I was getting from them. The whole 'real-time updates from people around you' is really good.
All in all really useful until a year or so, when they started 'filtering' their firehose of tweets. Now it's completely useless. I've found out that at major events (even when I click to see 'all' tweets) only a few tweets per second appear, which is completely implausible. The last few times that I tried to look something there I've found absolutely nothing but bs.
Example: Looking for 'ambulance OR police car at NEIGHBORHOOD' (because I want to know what happened) Tweet results are: @ladygaga - DOWNLOAD THE NEW SINGLE AMBULANCE FROM LADY GAGA - 4,397 Retweets 5,322 Favorites @someguy - OMG AMBULANCE IS AMAZING! LADY GAGA ARMY! - 200 Retweets, 20 Favorites ...
So long, twitter.