Twitter saw explosive growth in recent years, but the company has struggled to monetize all of its users effectively. Now the company is public after a much publicized IPO, and the focus has turned to pleasing its investors. In an effort to recapture some of its earlier growth magic, Twitter is redesigning its UI/UX and hoping to attract even more users to the Internet giant.
“Moment by moment, your Twitter profile shows the world who you are,” the company stated in a blog post on their site. “Starting today, it will be even easier (and, we think, more fun) to express yourself through a new and improved Web profile.”
Twitter reported in February of 2014 that it had roughly 241 million users at the end of 2013, though little was mentioned about the distinction between active user engagement and drone accounts drip-fed by post bots or mass managed by social media marketing teams. By comparison Facebook claims to have nearly 1.2 billion active users, and the mobile app WhatsApp, which the company famously bought for 19 billion earlier this year, has stated that it serviced another 400 million active monthly users as of last December. For that reason it should surprise no one that the new Twitter interface has a decidedly ‘Facebook-like’ style to it.
Twitter does have a huge audience and has reported continued growth long after most companies historically have slumped. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has acknowledged a need to reach an even larger audience, and he described the effort during the company’s February earnings call with analysts.
“By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background we can increase high quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users will find the service as indispensable as our existing core users do.”
The move shows that even the largest digital players are continuing to struggle to find the balance between growth and monetization in a market dominated by many freemium alternatives.
