Twitter Home Page & Retention

Posted by Ruben Ricart in Social Networks, Twitter on July 30th, 2009 | one response

Twitter, Tweets, and Tweep, probably coming to a Dictionary near you pretty soon.
We’ve all heard of it by now and if you haven’t the main question you should be asking yourself is,where have I been?

If you are one of the folks privileged enough to possibly understand twitter and you’ve sat down to explain this somewhat new phenomenon you will probably realize that it’s not that easy to explain to someone who does not understand blogging or social media. According to several statistics out there Twitter fails at retaining users, at least they used to before they implemented several changes that will hopefully help folks get a better picture of what this service provides.

According to these past statistics, 60% of Twitter users have been known to quit the service within the first month of signing up and most sign up and never return. The quitters fail to understand the purpose of this service and frankly I don’t blame them. I’ve even heard it time and time before from some of my friends; why do I need to let everyone know what I’m doing every minute of the day?, What’s the purpose of Twitter?, I hate blogging, why should I sign up for it? among a hundred other reasons.

Twitter realizes that the average person does not really get them, and I’ll vouch for that myself because when I signed up for the service I really did not understand it. I thought the cool thing about it would be the following/followers function. I figured that If I could get a good amount of followers, twitter could serve as a content delivery service/newsletter list. I understand now that this is not the true purpose of this service - it’s actually (ahem excuse me) a”Micro-Blogging Platform” at least that’s what they call themselves. It’s Micro because they only allow you to blog 140 characters per tweet(broadcast/post). The great thing is that there is no time limit on how fast you can tweet, so if you have to get a message across you can divide it into however many tweets you’d like.

In any event, Twitter has realized the fact that most folks don’t understand them and how they’ve missed out on thousands to millions of prospective users by not improving their landing page and because of this they have already changed the home page look and added some cool features like the twitter search engine function, trending popular topics by the hour, day and week and language options for those that speak Japanese.

Twitter Home Page-Image

Here is an excerpt of what Twitter said regarding the new home page:

“Today we’re trying a redesigned front page for folks who are new to Twitter.com. If you’re a regular around these parts, then you won’t notice the new look unless you sign out of your account. Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.”

Truth is I always wondered why the search twitter function was hosted on a sub domain since it is so useful in targeting specific topic tweets and now they’ve realized how important it is and they’ve implemented it.

I think as of now Twitter is great for business users targeting a niche specific market. It’s great for folks wanting to follow celebs and get an inside look at the fact they are regular people. It’s a great tool as a content delivery service and I guess at the end of the day in some occasions it’s great to deliver news.

In my opinion and for my own use, Twitter serves multiple roles. I can reach a market, send a quick tweet to my sisters and even get a clue on what’s the trending buzz in America or elsewhere among a few other.

What do you think of twitter, and how do you use it? do you like the new home page look? do you think it will help retention? Let me hear your thoughts….

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