Do you use Twitter?
A lot of reporters have found it to be a very useful tool.
But is it about to be overtaken by other platforms? The financial press is pointing to some red flags.
The high-profile social media company’s latest financial report showed no growth in new users during the most recent quarter, and well behind earlier projections for the full year.
This has financial analysts fretting over the company’s future.
According to one recent article:
User growth remains stagnant, interaction is flat and, while revenues are up quarter over quarter, the company continues to lose money.
A Wall Street Journal column points to fine print in the “forward looking” portion of its financials, which has been quietly adding new future risks onto the public record (“For Twitter’s Troubles, Read the Fine Print“).
It notes:
Twitter adjusted its language around future risk. It now says that there’s the possible risk that its user base and engagement “do not grow or decline.” That phrase was swapped in for “do not continue to grow.” It also added a new possible risk that “Twitter’s strategies, priorities or plans take longer to execute than anticipated.”
As the column notes, “subtle additions to forward-looking statements can provide clues about what might eventually balloon into a bigger problem.”
But as Twitter users, what do you think? Does Twitter play as great a role for you as it did a year or two ago? Where does it sit in your list of useful applications and sites?
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What’s even more interesting is how most surviving old school media are making money and the so called new media like Twitter and You Tube and Facebook don’t. All have incredible value on Wall Street but are still waiting to make a dollar…
It’s troubling to me. Twitter and TweetDeck are great platforms to spit out bites of information to a niche audience. Likewise, and especially if you organize searches as column-like “ticker tapes” via TweetDeck, it’s an efficient way to collect information on niche subjects, whatever your interest/subject matter may be.
Facebook can’t do that very well. And, as far as I can see, Instagram and other more hip social media platforms don’t do that as well either.
I agree with Gordon. It is troubling. I use Twitter as a work-related ticker tape, while Facebook to me is more about connecting with my far-flung family. (although I do push my blog there through an automatic Twitter feed) Twitter enables us to follow — and break — breaking news, without some awkward algorithm changing the order of the feed.
Twitter is incredibly useful for those interested in news. Saw this tweeted:
Twitter is a news service with social aspects. Facebook is a social network on which people sometimes post news.
Will be interesting to see how the news-first audience fares in a world more driven by the social-first crowd.
Ian: do you respond to your mentions on Twitter or see who’s sharing your posts there?
Twitter is dying? You wouldn’t know it by the way Trump’s campaign has used it to get out its messages. And last I heard, that fella has got a rather sizable lead in the polls.
uh, George, your information is flat-out wrong.
Last year, Facebook had $3.69 billion in net income. Revenue was $17.93 billion, up 44% year-over-year, and ad revenue was $17.08 billion, up 49% year-over-year.
no, i don’t work for facebook. yes, newspapers are dying. cheers!
Oh….I don’t believe I said newspapers…I think I said old media. Yes, newspapers are included in that but also tv and radio as well. Gannett the largest old media company in the country appears to be quite strong. You mentioned Facebook to make your point but I note you failed to mention how much in the red You Tube and Twitter are experiencing. Both are quite valuable on Wall Street but bleed cash…
Yo George YouTube isn’t “bleeding cash”- According to the Wall Street Journal it broke even in 2014 on $4 billion of revenue… Also YouTube is owned by Alphabet Inc. (Google) which makes its true value difficult to ascertain, though it is certainly greater than the $1.65 billion it was purchased for in 2006.
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967) (paywall)
Also to comment on the subject at hand Twitter sucks and will never be profitable.
Twitter is excellent for news organizations and campaigns to connect with the people who eschew face book, for whatever reason. Plus for-pay web news sources often post ‘free’ links to their content. I find it very useful to fill up my reading list without investing a lot of money for content I’ll never read.
Here’s an argument that Twitter should not exist as a publicly traded corporation, but rather as either part of a major corporation (Google, Facebook), or as a nonprofit foundation (Craigslist, Wikipedia) or a private company:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/technology/twitter-to-save-itself-must-scale-back-world-swallowing-ambitions.html?_r=0
A business like Facebook is really an infinitely expandable platform. Twitter, in contrast, is a niche — basically a free digital telegram service.
BTW, in the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, it was found that the best method of communication was Twitter and Facebook. In disasters, phone lines are down or jammed with calls. (Having a landline phone just for emergencies might be as futile as having cellphones.) Short text messages broadcast to the world (“I’m okay” or “Now heading to train station”) that can be read (asynchronously) at the convenience of others (who are also direly preoccupied) are the best way to communicate in a catastrophe. So there might be a civil defense role for such social media, and (governmental) regulation would derive from that. But to what extent is this potential now obsolete, just a few years later, with the popularity of text messaging apps? That is, for such personal communication, people can use Whatsapp or Line, and Twitter and Facebook become more business oriented.