Case about Twitter and related questions which are located below.
Answer the following questions:
1) How does Twitter create value for its customers versus other major social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr.? Consider what makes Twitter unique among social networks. You could start by taking a strategic look by developing a perceptual map or SWOT analysis or another tool to understand the marketplace and the company.
2) What should be Twitter’ s strategic direction? Make some concrete suggestions as to how Twitter can accelerate growth in users covering aspects of marketing such as product, price, promotion and place.
Type your answer in four or five sentences below (two to three sentences for each question) and be prepared to discuss in the weekly class discussion session in Zoom.
CASE: Saving Twitter
With Twitter experiencing flat user growth in recent earnings reports and losing 2 million active users, the company is struggling and has few ideas as to how to gain users back. What needs to be fixed and how can Twitter get back on track? Traditional marketing theory would hold that the company needs to work from its core competencies, that is, what makes it unique, and build from there.
First, what makes Twitter unique? Twitter is a short-format platform or microblog, at first limited to 140 characters (now 280). However, that limitation is a technical characteristic that can easily be imitated on another platform. What else makes Twitter unique and how can the company capitalize on that uniqueness? Perhaps what Twitter has going for it its customer base and what their interests are? For example, Lady Gaga has over 60 million Twitter followers and carefully manages interactions with her fan base of power users. Companies should think like Lady Gaga and find out where their best promoters reside on Twitter. Twitter should also make better use of its most influential “Tweeters” because they hold the key to the marketplace and better monetization of the platform.
What Twitter is known for is trending news, another trend that is led by its customer base. News reports from the Arab Spring to the Boston Marathon bombings to the engagement of Prince William have ‘broken’ on Twitter. However, if Twitter is not careful, they could lose this advantage. The market for those who seek trending news will go to other social media outlets. Instagram and Snapchat are growing more quickly and are more visually-oriented than Twitter.
One particular problem in this situation is that Twitter is one of the only, if not THE only social media platform where one has to use another platform to understand the tool! Twitter spawned Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and other tools to manage the stream of news events. Even Twitter analytics themselves are separate from the platform. The events scroll past endlessly and good Twitter users post the same content multiple times as they try to capture the viewers’ attention. The addition of ‘’while you were away: feature is in recognition of this problem.
Twitter recently turned a profit but its user growth and number of total users have lagged behind other, more popular, social networks. Some of these networks, like Instagram, launched after Twitter but have outpaced it in terms of usage. Facebook had over two billion users, Instagram 800 million and Twitter 330 million, as of January 2018. In late 2017, Twitter increased the number of characters of its Tweets to 280 and also rolled out a product to promote Tweets automatically. The question for Twitter is: Can these changes help in the long run?
The decision to change what counts as a character for a Tweet to exclude media attachments and @names is a beginning, but more needs to be done to rejuvenate the stalled platform. What ideas do you have to ‘save’ Twitter?
1.Koh, Yoree (2016, February 11), “Twitter Woes Mount as Growth Stalls— For the first time, social media firm fails to show any user gains; shares fall to new lows”, The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from http://www.wsj.com/
2. Hernandez, Daniela (2015, September 15), “Why can’t Twitter kill its bots?”, Fusion. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from Link (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
3. Pickering, Ben (2013, November 3), “10 Types of Twitter Users”, The Huffington Post. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from Link (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
4. Dunne, Brendan (2012, September 28), “Which social networks are more user friendly, Twitter or Facebook?”, Quora. Retrieved March 3, 2016 from Link (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
please write a total of 500 word answers for the questions with citation.please make sure it is not plagiarized.
Answer preview :
Word limit : 603