Can Live Video Save Twitter?
Twitter is coasting along nicely after releasing a series of product improvements and maintaining a healthy ad dollars business. However, the company is still stuck in a cycle of analysis paralysis on what to do next to hit its overarching goal of user growth without offending its existing user base. Twitter is too timid to make any changes, and according to some sources, most ideas floated inside the company to achieve the goal were shot down because of the fear of losing existing users. Whenever a new idea was proposed, the response would be, “We can’t do this because X might happen,” so changes made were all incremental and didn’t really grow the user base in the last few years.
But the risk of failure is worth the promise of delivering something great. Twitter has all the ingredients of what makes a good company with a lot of wiggle room to experiment. It’s on a mission to keep its 328 million monthly active users and the rest of the world informed. It has decided on a promising strategy to take on live streaming of sports, entertainment, news, and political events. They need to bring these together, tackle their biggest challenges, experiment, and repeat.
Placing Bets on Live Video #content
In an article in The New Yorker, Gigaom founder and VC Om Malik criticized the strategy of moving into live video. Instead, they called for a strategy towards photos and text. A month after, an article in Forbes authored by Joel Comm sided with Twitter. He said that video content is one of the most popular topics of conversation. Therefore the company should continue to invest in this area. For the most part, I agree with what’s been pointed out in those articles, but I don’t think it’s an “either/or” strategy.
Twitter has done an excellent job to make sure that content creators can generate something (tweet, photo, streams, clips) with minimal effort. Creating a tweet is much simpler than creating a full-length animation video, and the effort between different types of content varies a lot. The consumption vs. effort chart probably looks something like this.
However, time spent on content creation and consumption is meaningless metrics. The real challenge is keeping people engaged using other factors. It would be tough to plot engagement because it is not tied to any specific content type.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a tweet, a photo, or a video. This is why Instagram was able to capture its audience even if it focused only on images early on. In contrast, Facebook was able to do the same with a spectrum of the different content available on its feed. If you can deliver engaging content, users will consume it.
Therefore, the real question here is not whether Twitter should go with video streaming or not. It’s how it fits into the overall mission of keeping the world informed. They need to look at the core of Twitter as a product, amplify its value, and deliver what the users want.
As Joel Comm pointed out, “Imagery in social media isn’t what draws advertisers, either. Engaged users do that. Each image posted on Facebook or Instagram triggers a wave of comments and likes that keep users engaged.” Live video isn’t a holy grail that can make or break Twitter. It’s just a tool that they can use to capture back the world’s attention.
Now that we settled that, how do we make sure that the eyeballs are all on Twitter and not elsewhere?
Bring People Together #secretsauce
Twitter began pushing for its live-streaming strategy more aggressively after acquiring Periscope, a live-broadcasting app that offers real-time video feeds, enabling individuals to see what’s happening around the world. After the acquisition, the company has steadily made progress in live streaming and integrated Periscope’s platform capability. It is basically Twitter’s live streaming engine, and Periscope and Twitter continue to operate as distinct brands. As Keyvon Beykpour, Periscope’s co-founder, pointed out, “[Periscope] is mostly separate from Twitter but helped inform the larger strategy,” Beykpour told Bloomberg. He wants Twitter to be the prominent place to share, whether it’s you on the street capturing or a professional publisher that wants to share content.
According to Hootsuite, In Q3 2017 alone, Periscope/Twitter has live-streamed more than 830 events and 96 million hours of live user-generated content. Advertisers have high confidence that Twitter’s video ads can convert at par or even better than on Instagram. 67% of Twitter users don’t find promoted videos as intrusive, and 73% actually found the video ads informative. Finally, tweets with videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted. In other words, this type of content works. Even if you look at just Periscope, it has an estimated 2.8 million daily active users, according to Apptopia. If Twitter becomes a force in live streaming, it needs to overcome a few challenges.
First, the company needs better to communicate both Twitter and Periscope’s live streaming strategy. Twitter’s plans are more clear, but Periscope appears to be the neglected child that has become “a shell of its former self” with users abandoning or switching to Facebook or YouTube instead.
The next challenge that they need to solve is relevance. Twitter has an easy user interface to start a live broadcast. In particular, Periscope built an analytics dashboard to track video duration, number of viewers, and other metrics, and the app has attracted several types of content creators. However, it seems to have done very little for the users consuming the content. They need to surface the right content at the right time to the right users. The company lags behind the massive audiences that YouTube and Facebook have, and they cannot compete just by reach.
Third, they should create groups and focus on building a devoted community of streamers and viewers who are well connected. Discussions on what’s going on worldwide are highly dependent on network effects, so they need to build a sense of community. Instead of simple features to share or discuss topics that revolve purely around one event, Twitter should expand the discussion to collect related broadcasts or events.
Finally, they need to continue building trust. They need to build better protection around privacy and make sure that they keep people safe. They need to remove bullies, sex offenders, and content violators from the platform and put more controls to clean up its content. Twitter seems to have its act together when it comes to these topics, but Periscope seems to be lagging as it continues to make noise around sex and child pornography.
It’s All About the Flywheel #growth
The final stage is understanding how live video can be integrated into the flywheel. Amazon is well-known for its relentless strategy to grow the flywheel. A recent Reuter article shows how Amazon’s strategy for video is to convert viewers into shoppers. “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” Bezos said at a 2016 technology conference near Los Angeles. The decision as to what content to show is based on how cheap the “cost per stream” is. This seems like a very business-centric approach, but it's directly tied to user engagement when you think about bringing the cost down. The more viewers who consume the content, the more relevant and engaging it is, the cheaper it is to stream.
Twitter can follow the same approach when it comes to video streaming selection. It has reported a significant boost from streaming sports highlights and TV show recaps, ranging from NFL highlights to Game of Thrones. Removing the revenue generated from video ads running next to live broadcasts, what’s the “cost per stream” for these various programming types? How many of these users go back to watch other content, tweet, or scroll through the feed (e.g., Twitter’s version of Prime)?
Twitter needs to become more than just a pseudo-ad tech platform that’s hungry for clicks and ad revenue. It needs to becoming a growth platform and start caring for its users.
It all boils down to capturing the subsequent actions that users take and analyzing how they engage with the product as a whole. It requires a more holistic view and understanding of the users beyond just clicks or streaming minutes per content. Twitter must capture and interpret what happens next to make informed decisions on how to funnel back resources into the right content, video products, and partnerships. To sustain this growth, it needs to look at the video stream's effect on the entire Twitter ecosystem.
For the flywheel to work, they must first go back and fix the problems. Periscope is the laboratory, and Twitter is the field. They need to experiment and fail a few times to get this symbiotic relationship right. They need to execute properly, fix relevance, earn trust, and bring people together. If they get these things right, then video streaming might save Twitter.