In the wake of Twitter's 73% stock pop, CEO Dick Costolo
described the challenge: Twitter needs to get better at the process
of
"onboarding" new users who sign up for an account to see what
all the fuss is about.
"That language and that scaffolding [of Twitter] can be
confusing and opaque to users who come to the service for the first
time," Mr. Costolo said. He called out the need for Twitter to
appear "simple and easy" to users who are visiting for the first
time.
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Unlike Facebook, where the experience of seeing Halloween
snapshots and baby portraits from a mix of friends, family and
acquaintances is the site's known purpose, Twitter is a service
whose utility is uniquely fitted to users based on their
interests.
That makes explaining precisely what it is more of a cipher.
Twitter content is wildly different for someone who follows their
favorite actors and views tweets during prime-time hours than it is
for a media professional who uses the service to stay on top of
news throughout the day, for example. And if a new user doesn't
take the time to follow interesting users, Twitter won't appear to
have much value at all.
Twitter has made moves to make the product less intimidating. A
prime example is its decision to show conversational tweets between
users as an in-stream sequence --
not inserted into the stream in whatever order they were posted --
to users who follow the participants.
Marketing problem
It's also turning again to consumer marketing to address what one
observer termed its "leaky bucket" problem. In August, Twitter
hired Facebook and Microsoft veteran Kate
Jhaveri to be its senior director of consumer marketing. The
job of making Twitter more approachable for a mainstream audience
had been vacant for almost two years, since
the three-month tenure of VP-consumer marketing Pam Kramer
ended.
Ms. Jhaveri's purview includes making sure that when someone
joins Twitter, there's enough value there to ensure they come back.
Currently, new users are taken through steps where they're
instructed to choose a set of celebrities, media organizations and
brands to follow, then given the option to mine their email
contacts for personal connections on Twitter.
Consumer marketing simply might have to become a bigger area of
investment for Twitter if it wants its monthly active user numbers
to grow briskly. It boils down to the fact that Twitter's user
growth in the U.S. has slowed down, and that's where it generated
74% of its revenue in the first nine months of the year. Just 53
million of Twitter's 232 million monthly active users as of the end
of September were U.S.-based (compared to 179 million for Facebook
in June).
What should Twitter do? It could could hypothetically start
employing direct-response tactics, like promoting a 15-second
tutorial showing how to set up a compelling Twitter account as a
pre-roll ad.
Less likely in the near term is another TV ad. Twitter
ran one in June 2012 on TNT during a NASCAR event to explain
its new hashtag pages -- a product for advertisers that never took
off -- and didn't repeat the experiment.
Twitter didn't respond to a request for comment on Ms. Jhaveri's
duties.
If and when Twitter does want to invest more in consumer
marketing, agencies will be lined up to pitch.
Explaining the value of Twitter as a window to learning about
the world, rather than a string of banalities from people they know
would be key, said Christian Haas, executive creative director at
Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
"Twitter can attract new audiences by promoting curated lists of
content [that new users] can easily follow and, that way, position
the service as having a finger on popular culture," he said in an
email.