[Read Reaction #3] An Alternative Perspective on Twitter's Future

In the reading of chapter 9 – 12 of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's work, we gained a deeper grasp of how the utilization of the groundswell benefits business, and how it helps organizations make structural transformations. From the previous chapters, we learned how to interact with the groundswell, and in the four chapter, we push this interaction further for the purpose of an incisive change to our business model so that it is better welcomed by the everchanging market and customers' preference.

In chapter 10, Li and Bernoff gave us a detailed, case-based presentation of the power of the social platform Twitter. The all-time monitoring and responding from McDonald's customer satisfaction team on Twitter turned out to be a good strategy. The team interfered in a timely manner and successfully turned Fadra Nally's customer complaint into a social media campaign drawing over four thousand attentions (p. 195-197). Despite the quick response of McDonald's customer team, Twitter's convenient function of forging connections with each other – users literarily do not need any precondition to follow or be followed by another user. Therefore, customers could easily get in touch with the business, and the business could listen to their voice and give quick responses. Just like what is said in Li and Bernoff's (p. 197), “It (Twitter) caught on not only for the reasons… it's free and open, connects people, and gives them power – but also because it's so simple.”

However, in this post, please allow me to adopt an alternative perspective. While many businesses put the gravity of their strategy on Twitter, there are strong clues to show Twitter would play a less important role in the future groundswell, because Twitter is slowly dying. Twitter was once one of the most popular social networks in the U.S. and even in the world. It only took Twitter 3 years to climb up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site (2006-2009). The period of 2011-2014 was a golden age for Twitter. The number of active users increased 30%-40% annually at that time.

However, things have changed since 2015. The graph below shows the number of Twitter's Monthly Active Users (MAUs) from late 2014 to the first quarter of 2017. We could see a clear dive on the growth rate, which dropped to less than 5% in the whole year of 2016. In Q2 of 2017, the number of Twitter U.S. monthly active users actually declined, and for those inactive accounts, 48 million of them are bots, and nine to 15 percent of tweets come from fake accounts. In the meantime, Twitter's several major rivals remained powerful. By the beginning of 2017, Facebook was still the largest social network with 2 billion monthly active users, followed by YouTube (1.5 billion), Whatsapp (1.2 billion) and Instagram (700 million). The MAUs of new platform Snapchat has been in a rapid increase since last year, reaching 255 million in May 2017. If this trend continues this year, Twitter is likely to be surpassed by Snapchat.

Why is Twitter slowly dying? Reasons could be multiple. In the physical world, 50 percent of new companies fail within five years, and based on this rule, David Giannetto found out that in the digital world the equivalent of every organization dies every 8.5 years (i.e., The Eight Year Rule). 2014 is Twitter's 8th anniversary, and it was in the late of this year Twitter showed a sign of stagnation. Internet-based businesses, no matter big or small, all suffer the curse of the Eight Year Rule, and they will go across the eight-year gap if they don't seek for a change in their business model. Twitter hasn't been innovative for years. No wonder they saw their limitation recently. Another problem is a long-existing one for Twitter: abuse and spam. The anonymity and openness made Twitter heaven in the cyber world, but also turned it into chaos later. In one of his article, Umair Haque writes, “we once glorified Twitter as a great global town square, but I've never been to a town square where people can shove, push, taunt, bully, shout, harass, threaten, stalk, creep and mob you… and you can't even call a cop.”

Despite the abuse, there are millions of zombie accounts who awaken to hammer the platform with political messaging to twist public perception of the truth every day.

No matter what, the groundswell could not be energized without a large population. If Twitter does not take any action to save itself from the backwater, it will lose the chance of any groundswell, then its users, then the business.

       

Work Cited

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies(1st ed.). Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.