Will Twitter’s latest gamble pay off?

The previous article quoted remarks of Chris Sacca, the Silicon Valley investor, concerning Twitter; its uniqueness, and its future in case it ever pursued a sale with giants like Facebook, Google, and many others.

Analysts received those remarks in awe about a week ago; it did not take long, however, to discover that there are a lot of things cooking behind the closed doors of Twitter’s board of directors. Last Thursday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, in position since 2010, decided to resign, leaving the office to the founder Jack Dorsey who will act as an interim CEO starting July 1.
For a lot of analysts, Sacca comments proved to be the last nail in the coffin that led to Costolo’s resignation.
The immediate available explanation to the situation beyond the walls of the blue bird offices is that shareholders are not satisfied with the company’s performance; there is no user growth, not enough revenue growth and crawling stock prices.
Away from the corporate world calculations, any Twitter user can feel and certify that the platform has gone through a lot of changes in the past few years; it is more stable now — do you remember the last time Twitter has crashed? Now compare that to its frequent crashes before 2010! It has rolled out so many interesting features. The tweets are more media friendly now with photos and videos, direct messaging has evolved and it will soon accept more than the limit of 140 characters, in addition the feature of “while you were away” tweets and so on. These all changes had taken place under the leadership of Costolo.
Nevertheless, the major problem he had with the company’s investors was that they thought that he failed to monetize the platform in a more efficient way. His plans to market ads and promoted tweets are not working as expected. Advertisers are shying away from pouring money into the platform because they are not sure their messages will reach their targeted audience.
There are influencers and platform stars who can push a tweet to its limits, to explode, but that explosion could fire either ways; in favor of the brand, in case a positive engagement followed the explosion, or against the brand, hurting its image and reputation if it somehow got tangled in a negative narrative between the platform users.
The real challenge Twitter is currently facing though, according to a number of analysts, is that it is living a transition period from being a company owned by a few with big dreams into a corporation with public stocks and shareholders who believe in nothing but numbers and have little patience for long term strategies. At a closer look, the company is not doing bad at all. It is recording almost 20 percent annual growth and it has around 302 million monthly active users. Chris Taylor from Mashable calls this situation “The Public Problem.”
“A public-owned company can raise a lot more investment, but it is also legally required to keep creating more and more shareholder value. Hence the desperate scramble for user growth and the purchase of other platforms, Vine and Periscope,” he wrote.
“None of it was enough to placate an increasingly active group of shareholders, the ones who think Twitter should be growing as fast as Facebook. These are the people for whom four million new users a quarter was a sign of failure.”
Now, we can only wait and see how these new developments would affect Twitter and what its future leaders would do to improve the company’s growth.