During the last three months of 2016, Twitter saw a decline in user activity and lost more than £100 million. Over the year, the social networking site had 319 million monthly users which was only a 4% growth from 305 million the year before. These poor financial results because of slow user growth have brought into question ways in which the site could get back on form and one possible way that they are looking to do this is to capitalize on those who use it most.
One suggestion is the release of an advanced Tweet Deck. This is an alternative site and desktop application for the social network that allows users to view multiple columns in their Timeline, @ mentions, lists and search results and is described as “the most powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement”. Twitter have claimed that a premium service of the Tweet Deck will allow users to see alerts and trends in a dashboard that they can customize but will come at a cost of $19.99 a month.
The social networking site believes that this service will provide an improved experience for journalists, professionals, marketers and users with a large amount of followers as it will give alerts about how many users are tweeting about a certain subject and analysis of tweets. However, there is still no confirmation that this service will come into fruition.
Twitter has received a lot of backlash over the past year, primarily regarding the issues that users have faced with security. Since then, it has made it possible to mute anonymous users and have also considered plans to release a ‘safe search’ tool to mute Tweets that may contain sensitive words, images or videos. CEO Jack Dorsey commented on the company’s journey, stating that it had “been hard” in response to the company’s loss of £100 million and an overall lack of growth. Introducing a paid subscription service will undoubtedly increase Twitter’s revenues but despite the impact that the site continues to make for some, a premium Tweet Deck may not necessarily improve user growth.
