Twitter is a $17.6 billion case of the Emperors New Cloths. Compared to other services, no one actually uses Twitter.
Be honest: when was the last time you read something interesting on Twitter? Where did you find it / hear about the tweet? How many hours have you honestly spent surfing / browsing / reading Twitter in the last week?
Twitter is basically this:
1000 or so celebrities, major political figures, thought leaders or dissidents who have millions of followers (of which only a couple thousand followers actually follow and read the stuff regularly)
Another 10-20,000 or so niche experts, more narrowly focused mini-celebrities who are followed by people in their industry or particular area of interest: certain tech / science / hobby / sports / music communities, authors etc. — these each have tens of thousands of official followers and a few dozen who actually read the stuff regularly.
Several thousand reporters: political, niche industry, business, entertainment and sports reporters who follow tweets relevant to their reporting so they can let the real world know when something clever (rarely) is said or something important (even more rarely) is reported.
Several thousand major companies who spam marketing stuff which is almost never read — and basically they run a wing of customer service / support for people who complain on Twitter – very occasionally they will tweet something snappy or make a clever reply….and it will be picked up by sources that people actually read like the news and Facebook.
A few thousand event specific Twitter users / followers — in times of crisis or civil unrest this is where Twitter has shined – but even in cases like the Egyptian revolution the number of popular tweets shared were most often in the single digit thousands – about as much as a C-list has-been sitcom star will get for an Instagram post about a sandwich.
A few million regular users – Twitter claims 316 million regular monthly users – this no doubt includes all aggregators, automatic login services etc that people use when they spent 10 seconds glancing over their feed or making an obligatory tweet themselves because they feel they should — I also bet that the overwhelming majority only login for a couple minutes to tweet or read something on rare occasion (usually because they heard it elsewhere) — my guess is about 1% of these ….around 3.1 million people actually use Twitter regularly — the number of people who use Twitter for say, a full hour each day is very minimal — it’s just not sticky like that – some professional page managers, customer service reps, a few of the dedicated 1% and a handful of people in the narrow tech / special interest categories might occasionally end up involved in or following a deep conversation that they check into several times or spend an hour on….but it’s rare
At the end of the day an amazing, noteworthy and very widely read tweet will be favorited and retweeted tens of thousands of times….basically the exposure of a medium level Facebook page, a very moderate YouTube channel or a small city local newspaper gets every single day.
Even more rarely….as in only a few dozen times in Twitter history, a tweet will hit half a million or so favorites and shares…examples are Ellen Degeneres’s famous all-star selfie (the most popular tweet ever with a few million favorites and shares) or Obama’s tweet about Ahmed’s clock (around 500k favorites and shares) – even in these black swan cases, engagement is light, actions taken are minimal and the overwhelming majority of people find out about the Tweet from another source (where did you personally hear of the Degeneres’s and Obama tweets?) — so even the very most popular tweets only reach the level of an average successful celebrity Facebook post or video — nothing on Twitter ever comes close to the consistency of other channels. By contrast Lady Gaga has single videos with more views than the top 50 tweets in Twitter history combined. Dan TDM, a 20 something Brit who comments about Minecraft consistently has more views and up-votes….on multiple videos…every single week…than the President of the United States had on his most popular tweet ever.
So Twitter is basically smoke and mirrors. Not close to Facebook or Instagram — not nearly as useful or engaging as LinkedIn – it has more impact than MySpace but is not the social media powerhouse people pretend it is.
It’s still valuable – surprisingly, despite sluggish user growth, low engagement and a very weak interface and even weaker ad platform, Twitter manages a couple billion in revenue — but still loses money.
Personally I think it’s crazy to waste ad dollars on Twitter and I wouldn’t buy the stock.