Why is Twitter still confused about its identity?

Twitter has been a rather odd example of a successful social network  because success seems to have happened around it, as opposed to being driven by the co-founders. Use of Twitter has exploded over the past few years, thanks largely to high profile celebrity use to bring it into the mainstream.

Yet it is evolving in ways that doesn’t seem to have been in the original plans for the co-founders. It is, by nature, a very organic platform and having always run an open API, you would expect a certain amount of innovation to come from outside Twitter, but it seems that Twitter just happens to be this platform that the co-founders own and the innovation has happened around them.

At a recent technology conference, Jack Dorsey (co-founder) stated that Twitter is much more than a social platform and is actually more about information, with no need for people to join to enjoy the service. This however seems at odds with the very social nature of the platform that was responsible for its early growth in the first place.  The point of view that Dorsey puts forward is surely ultimately detrimental to the service. He claims ”The biggest value is finding out what’s happening in your world in real time.” and that ”you don’t have to tweet at all”.

The problem of course is that these two statements are contradictory. How can you really find out what’s happening near you if people are being told they don’t have to tweet at all? If this is how everyone sees Twitter, the value of the service is diminished. Why aren’t the founders pushing Twitter as a social information service, instead of just encouraging people to sit there and absorb? The value in Twitter is in the sum of its users and the information on there, and this should be encouraged.

Twitter’s identity problem can perhaps be seen most clearly when in 2009 they changed their status update prompt from ‘what are you doing’ to ‘what’s happening?’. This was likely in response to the changing way that people were beginning to use the site, as it became more about news and covering local events than it did about social sharing.

Damaging themselves?

When you consider this change of direction for Twitter, it is perhaps then easier to understand why they have found it more difficult to monetise and attract advertisers than Facebook or LinkedIn. Right now social advertising is growing, and advertisers seek a way to get in front of an engaged audience in an increasingly targeted way. They rely on the social data that the platforms own. Yet Twitter is moving away from social, if we are to listen to Dorsey’s recent comments. It is then a news platform, and stories of their difficulties to effectively monetise are well known.

In this way, Twitter may be ultimately damaging themselves from distancing itself as a pure play social network. If a brand hears that Twitter is more about news and that the majority of people don’t even have to log in to benefit, they’re hardly going to be throwing their ad dollars at it. The engagement opportunities vary little then from placing a banner on the homepage of a newspaper site.

Twitter’s identity problems have perhaps been marked by the fact that the internal team has seen a lot of movement, with co-founders leaving, rejoining, and then others leaving to start new ventures. With Facebook, for better or worse, you know that you are essentially following Mark Zuckerberg’s vision. That he often makes changes that may seem initially at the detriment to users but whose true value is then realised yet with Twitter, there is a much less definite sense of identity and vision. It needs to remain organic up to a point, but ultimately to decide what kind of platform it is and then do this in the best way.