Twitter is piling up with new features: Twitter reinvents some half-implemented, several simply announced, others already underway (though not yet). 2021 has started off strong for the blue-bird social network, which seems eager to reinvent itself and leave behind the “microblogging network” label. Why all the excitement?
On the table are the financial results for 2020 , in which despite increasing its special lead revenue by 7% (up to $3,207.4 million), it recorded losses of $1,135.6 million (€935.6 million), thus returning to the red after having achieved a net profit of $1,465.7 million in 2019. And this despite the fact that the company’s figures had recovered in the second half of the year, because otherwise, the result could have been even worse.
Here is a review of the most relevant ones.
The challenge Twitter reinvents remains how to boost the number of active users , Twitter reinvents especially daily users, because this is where its ability to increase advertising revenue lies. The pace remains slow and is increasingly distancing itself from its main clean email competitors (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn), while new social networks (such as Clubhouse) enter the fray and threaten to overtake it. Twitter closed 2020 with 314.9 million monthly active users (compared to Facebook’s nearly 2.8 billion). But the number of daily active users remained at 192 million , do you know the different types of accommodation well? which, despite representing a 27% increase over 2019, is slightly lower than expected (193.5 million).
Twitter is reinventing itself, therefore, because it has no other choice . Despite its notoriety, its ability to become a news hub, its power to set news trends, Twitter is losing appeal among younger audiences , where its “source” should be (but who don’t understand the interest this social network may have for them), and the controversies over its growing irascibility and polarization are alienating some adults . (Side note: I personally love Twitter, but we can’t ignore the obvious.)
Thus, after the new features that Twitter launched in August 2020 , and the introduction at the end of the year of Fleets (a bombastic way of referring to Snapchat’s ephemeral stories, already successively copied by Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and LinkedIn), 2021 is set to be full of new initiatives (and we’re barely three months into it).
Going for audio social media: Racing against Clubhouse with Twitter Spaces
ClubHouse kicked off the race to lead audio social networks in January (taking advantage of the boom in podcasts), and Twitter has joined in with its Spaces audio chat rooms .