Despite that huge claim, there are only 310 million monthly active users, which means that 71 percent of the people who know that Twitter exists have decided: “nah, not for me”. Non-users, however, revealed two important issues: that a lot of people thought of Twitter as a social network, and that if they did use it, they were obligated to Tweet every day.
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“Many thought of Twitter primarily as a social network”, Berland wrote in a post.
For those who don’t see the value in sharing the mundanities of daily life, Twitter is still for you. Still, the video highlights and puts into context the changes to the platform over the a year ago.
At the time, Twitter launched a TV commercial which aired during the World Series and referenced how users could follow their favorite sports via tweets that included both texts and multimedia, like GIFs. Back in 2009 Twitter adopted “What’s happening?” as the question prompting people to tweet, which it later dropped and then re-adopted in 2014, as well as the company’s raison d’être. “From breaking news and entertainment to sports and politics – from big events to everyday interests with all the live commentary that makes Twitter unique”.
Twitter wants to be a broadcaster, which has its own pitfalls: accusations of bias, appalling harassment, racist bots that reach a huge audience.
Twitter’s key service has undeniably left a major mark on modern communications, going as far as raising support for extensive political developments like the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011. And now Twitter is explaining that, or at least highlighting it, in a way that might catch people’s attention. There are a number of steps that Twitter has taken to try and revitalise the platform, including relaxing the character limits, user interface changes, and a pretty cool feature that people seem to be forgetting about already, stickers. It’s not Facebook and never will be (and vice versa, as Facebook moves to show users more of their friend’s content and less publisher content).
Twitter’s identity crisis hasn’t been as severe as Yahoo, which just cut a $4.83 billion deal to sell its core business to Verizon. Now it just needs to convince everyone else.
Twitter’s newish CMO, Leslie Berland, published a blog post to coincide with the new video.
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In the blogpost, Twitter says they’ve realised they have “some explaining and clarifying to do” and from today will start to express what the service is about.
