Twitter needs new strategy, not longer tweets
it was impossible to include an image with a tweet — you could only link to a picture hosted elsewhere and you had to be careful over how long URLs were.
But as people became used to the greater flexibility of Facebook and then Instagram, Twitter, too, had to offer opportunities to include images, links and videos. The truth is that the 140-character limitation has long gone.
Nevertheless Twitter does still offer a specific format, appealing to many. You can compose a brief message accompanied by links, images their feed includes too much stuff they haven’t chosen. Therefore, Twitter has never yet been able to earn sufficient income to pay its expenses. Profitability is still deferred, as it always has been.
Two years ago, teaching a course called Understanding Media, I used to argue that Twitter was in a precarious position. Then Trump happened. One advantage Twitter has had since its launch is that it has always been talked about in the media, from sports to business, from TV to online newspapers. Nevertheless the new president’s fondness for this specific platform could not have been predicted and has led to an exponential growth in stories that mention Twitter. But it hasn’t been enough to correct the fundamental problems.
As technology journalist Charles Arthur wrote in The Guardian in February, not even the best efforts of Donald Trump can pull Twitter out of its dive. The company’s fourth-quarter results showed a loss of $167m (compared with $90m a year before) on flat revenues of $638m, with no clear path to profit. This despite the fact that the US president’s frequent outbursts helped increase the number of users by two million to 319 million.
Twitter exists in a highly competitive world, always glancing over its shoulder at competitors such as Sina Weibo, which earlier this year claimed to have overtaken Twitter in numbers of users. Sina Weibo offers more space than Twitter in each post. But Twitter’s new announcement, as if playing catch up, can do little if anything to address the fundamental challenges the social media platform continues to face. —The Conversation Julia Gillen is Senior Lecturer in Digital Literacies, Lancaster University
Twitter’s new announcement, as if playing catch up, can do little if anything to address the challenges the social media platform continues to face