WHITHER TWITTER?

Jarus

Jarus is the Chief Resource Officer of JarusHub

On my Facebook wall a couple of years ago, I echoed the popular opinion – fact, actually – on how Twitter was outpacing Facebook as the preferred social media platform, especially among the upper end of the social class and passed the verdict that Facebook may lose its top spot in relevance ladder to twitter at the rate twitter was going.

I was wrong with my verdict.

One of the biggest news in American/British business media last week was the Twitter downsizing.

They are laying off 9% of their workforce to keep their costs low. They are also cutting their marketing budget which, as a percentage of Revenue, was far lower than those of Facebook and Instagram.

Not done, the papers reported that Twitter made a loss in the last accounting year.

Still on it, their subscriber base has plateaued as the number of new users they got in 2016, was only very little higher than that of 2015.

They are even no longer close to Facebook in subscriber base, as they are now in distant #4 behind Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat (what’s that?).

Not only those, Google and Salesforce wanted to buy Twitter recently but “ran” away.

So bad that their founder-CEO that had quit to focus on some other things thinking the company had matured, had to come back.

No much difference.

One for the road: they’re also slashing their advert prices in desperation for revenue.

One business pundit with a British paper described Twitter management as being in stage 3 of crisis: Denial – that state when you refuse to accept there is serious problem and keep saying all is well, the stage just before acceptance.

If someone told me 2 years ago to guess which company will experience such crisis, I would have said Facebook, because Facebook was the platform that was becoming boring 2, 3 years ago. But the guys at Facebook kept innovating and bringing up new features that will enhance user experience.

Few years back, conventional media (CNN, BBC, local and international papers etc) were wont to use tweets for news. E.g CNN will quote someone’s tweets, or ask readers to give them feedback through twitter. Facebook was seen then as probably not deep enough. Now, respected media now reliably use Facebook posts for serious reports and medium of feedback.

So I ask, where is twitter going? Golgotha?

Twitter office in California

***

Twitter’s Layoff Memo to Staff as published by Business Insider

From: Jack Dorsey
To: All Employees
Date: October 13, 2015
Subject: A more focused Twitter

Team,

We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow. Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I’m going to give it to you straight.

The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The roadmap is focused on the experiences which will have the greatest impact. We launched the first of these experiences last week with Moments, a great beginning, and a bold peek into the future of how people will see what’s going on in the world.

The roadmap is also a plan to change how we work, and what we need to do that work. Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead. We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.

So we have made an extremely tough decision: we plan to part ways with up to 336 people from across the company. We are doing this with the utmost respect for each and every person. Twitter will go to great lengths to take care of each individual by providing generous exit packages and help finding a new job.

Let’s take this time to express our gratitude to all of those who are leaving us. We will honor them by doing our best to serve all the people that use Twitter. We do so with a more purpose-built team, which we’ll continue to build strength into over time, as we are now enabled to reinvest in our most impactful priorities.

Thank you all for your trust and understanding here. This isn’t easy. But it is right. The world needs a strong Twitter, and this is another step to get there. As always, please reach out to me directly with any ideas or questions.

Jack

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