The red carpet has been perfectly rolled out for Twitter to become the dominant platform in news-centric social media, and somehow I just know they're going to trip on it again.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced it is redesigning the app's Home screen to prioritize algorithmically-selected videos arranged vertically so users can continuously scroll through personalized content. This new Home screen will also showcase its Stories feature while demoting the long-standing "News Feed" view to a new "Feeds" tab.
Read as: Facebook has decided TikTok and Snapchat are the biggest threats to its relevance and sees copying these apps as the only chance it has to recapture the attention of young people.
So what does this mean for Twitter? Honestly, Twitter probably has far too much to worry about right now to be able to even daydream about long-term product strategy. But this feels like the golden opportunity for Twitter to finally step up and command the outsized space on the internet that it occupies. Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram have all collectively decided that text-based posts are taking a backseat to video content in their UIs even though Mark Zuckerberg seemed intent on making news-based feeds the heart and soul of Facebook only a few short years ago. If there's anything we learned about Twitter in the last 15 years, it's that they aren't particularly keen on bold product pivots, so I don't expect them to follow suit. In other words, because of their comedically slow drive to innovate, Twitter has all of a sudden found itself in a race with no other competitors.
You have to be skeptical when this happens. Facebook wouldn't have abandoned Twitter's content model if it wasn't a crappy business. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have zeroed-in on video as their medium-of-choice because the engagement is through the roof, and Gen Z has given a clear signal that short-form video is their preferred form of mindless entertainment. Twitter is definitively off-trend in this regard, but while those four companies juke it out over who can kill the most teenage brain cells 30 seconds at a time, Twitter might have some time to reposition itself as the premium platform for idea sharing and news commentary that everyone has been begging it to become. If Twitter maintains its current free tier but also switches to a subscription model with a cleaner feed, more catered news content, exclusive Twitter Spaces sessions, and other premium features, it might be able to give itself business model CPR and turn a well-used platform into a well-designed and well-loved experience.
Because at the end of the day, the one million users who actively post on Twitter each day also happen to be the one million most influential people in the world, and that creator roster should be remarkably easy to monetize. Twitter just has to step up now and figure out the right way.
I won't be holding my breath.
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