Twitter Shakes Up Executive Team To Spur Growth

Twitter has lost a COO, CFO, Head of Engineering, and VP of Consumer Products as it tries to pursue new growth opportunities.  But Twitter user growth has slowed while losses mount.  But let's be fair to Twitter, their usage is growing, just at a slower pace than previous quarters.  "Twitter’s membership in the first quarter rose 25 percent from a year earlier to 255 million, decelerating from 30 percent growth in the prior period and 39 percent in the third quarter of 2013."  And while 255 million users sounds impressive, it also matters how many are active users. 

Certainly great content helps drive users to share their thoughts through the service.  World Cup matches provide a great example of this as does all the snarky comments for every major awards show.  Still, users may also be growing tired of the service and the limit of 140 characters.  They say a picture paints a thousand words and sites like Instagram and Facebook may be providing too great a competition to the mix.  And the younger demos seem to lately prefer the Instagram route.  Or as I mentioned yesterday, we may simply be getting tired of too much sharing, especially when their ramifications lead to the need to apologize for our too quick tweeting.  Users may finally have figured out that it is time to put down that keyboard. 

For Twitter, the challenge to grow should not overshadow the need to drive revenue over costs and to build out a profitable business.  Changes in the type indicate that the current strategy was not working well enough and a new direction might be needed.  What that new direction will be could interesting.  May I suggest creating subset feeds, some that are categorized as strictly news, sports, or entertainment so that more relevant tweets reach us more quickly.  Just a thought.