Tuesday, April 22, 2014

For mainstream appeal, Twitter needs to be more like Twitter




 Image Courtesy Wagner Flickr Creative Commons (https://www.flickr.com/photos/wagner-machado-carlos-lemes/)

Recently, much has been made about Twitter seemingly looking like Facebook or about the ability to tag people in photos in Twitter like Facebook. Twitter offers a delightful experience especially the random walk to discovery and the serendipity of you-never-know what's-going-to-pop-up-next in your feed (especially if you follow a diverse set of people and entities).  For broader appeal, the company is addressing the right priority of mainstream relevance and adoption in its stated intent to " ...By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background..."

However, to do that,  I think Twitter needs to reach into its own strengths and yes, from there, draw some inspiration from others.  I offer a couple of thoughts for Twitter to amplify its appeal to the broader masses.

First, no doubt a simplified view but the ideal social media network  contains (among other things) the narcissism of Facebook, the serendipity of Twitter and the utility of a LinkedIn.

Narcissism is an underlying behavioral trait of mainstream media use. The name Myspace says it all or witness the viral distribution of the Facebook 10th anniversary "Look Back" self-video which saw 'hundreds of millions of movies rendered'. On narcissism, Twitter is highly skewed towards the celebrity. As a Twitter mainstream user remarked to me once, "I'm just going to take my 200 Twitter followers and go the (fill-in-the-blank) home". What Twitter needs to do is to make it more democratic for the masses so that they feel they have a shot at a moment of fame. Their time in the sun. Some ways to achieve that are editorial curation of non-celebrity Tweets through mechanisms such as "Tweet of the Day", "Notable Tweets", "Editor's Choice", "Rising Star"etc. an example being Blogger's Top Contributors.  Another example, fostering and encouraging forums like CNBC's Squawk on the Street where tweets of non-celebrity people are highlighted on the network for their creativity.  Twitter needs to find a way to harness all these outlets and more to make Twitter more gratifying to the masses.

On serendipity, one of the delightful aspects of Twitter is trends and breaking news. Currently, Twitter's notifications are along the lines of follow more people i.e. "People like XYZ" even if you are already following 100+ people. The masses don't have time for more information streams. But, they crave being the first to know. They fear missing out. So, the notifications should be, based on your interests, here is what news broke on Twitter, here is what you missed,  your interests XYZ is trending now etc.

Finally, just an Facebook adopted hashtags and celebrity following through Subscribe, there is one small thing that Twitter can draw inspiration from Facebook. Namely, the addictive, eye-catching, urgency inducing Red colored Notification icon for notifications. Twitter's blue on blue is too subtle for the mainstream. Red on Blue works - Look at the native apps on iPhone like the default mail icon, the phone icon etc.


No comments:

Post a Comment