Title: What's Wrong with Twitter - and How do You Fix it? | Social Media Today
Headings: What's Wrong with Twitter - and How do You Fix it?
What's Wrong with Twitter - and How do You Fix it?
Published Jan. 26, 2016
Problem One: Losing Control
Solution: Do What Third-Party Providers are Doing - But Better
Problem Two: Mess and Noise
Solution: Introduce Personalized Trending Topics and Follow Recommendations
Problem Three: Growing Pains

Content: That's how it has to be - Twitter's the ' global town square ', the place where people go to participate and add their insights into the wider, global conversation, people use Twitter as a real-time pulse of the issues and happenings of the world, and to have their say on those very same issues. But the problem with this is that Twitter's data is being used by an ever-growing number of third party providers for mention monitoring, share of voice analysis and other forms of tracking, much of which Twitter has little control over and gains little revenue from. And what's worse, some of these platforms actually reduce the need for users to visit Twitter proper, as all the data and insights are provided within these other platforms. That then reduces Twitter's capacity to monetize that audience - and as noted, user growth, both in terms of acquiring new users and time spent on platform, is a major concern for the micro-blog giant. To combat this, Twitter's been restricting access via their APIs. They've actually been doing this for years, trying to implement some form of control over their data feeds and get people back to their platform more often. The biggest recent example of this was the decision to eliminate share counts - while Twitter explained this as a system change (which may well be true), the perception was that Twitter eliminated share counts in order to push more people towards paying for their data from Gnip, Twitter's data arm, thereby enabling Twitter to a) make money from their data and b) get people to use their own platform instead of going elsewhere. Whether that is or isn't the case, it would clearly benefit Twitter if they could get more people to use their platform instead of gathering tweet-based information and insights from other providers. The whole social media monitoring industry is effectively built on Twitter, it's logical that the company would want to ensure they're getting a cut of the revenue generated in that space, and to leverage that attention to expand their audience share. Solution: