Talking Twitter

Platform Redesign

By Yardi Blog Staff on Feb 19, 2014 in Technology

The social media engine seems to be losing steam these days. Twitter’s revenue more than doubled in the fourth quarter yet the tech giant said it hit a roadblock in terms of user growth; in the fourth quarter, the site added just 9 million, or 3.8% more, new monthly active users to 241 million, down from 6.4% growth in the previous period. It was the fourth straight quarter of slowing growth, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Facebook Inc. on the other hand boasts about 1.2 billion registered users worldwide, though it also reported lower sequential user growth, set at 3.4% in the fourth quarter.

This slowdown in user growth indicates that it might be time for a change and Twitter knows how to take a hint. In an effort to transform itself into a mainstream product, the company announced a design makeover that will make Twitter more approachable to users. Twitter is very fond of experimentation as a product improvement technique and many of their strategies have proven successful.

“A common thread across recent releases has been experimentation,” commented Alex Roetter, VP, Engineering, in a Twitter blog post. “We’ve tested various features with small groups of our 200 million users before determining what we’ll release. These tests are essential to delivering the best possible user experience.”

“We also experiment with features that may never be released to everyone who uses Twitter. Those experiments are perhaps even more valuable because they help us decide what not to do – which is important as we work to keep Twitter simple while improving the user experience. Ultimately, our goal is to learn and keep making the product better; we aren’t necessarily looking to launch all of the experiments we roll out”, he added.

The Tweet re-design last year which included the refining of the ‘ reply’ , ‘ favorite’  and ‘ retweet’ options, as well as the ‘view/expand’ media features, resulted into a significant increase in user interaction. Actions such as retweets and favorites – the equivalent to liking or sharing posts on Facebook – have gone up which means people have become more engaged.

Many of their current experimentation efforts are focused on mobile as there’s a growing interest from both iPhone and Android users in Twitter. “With the majority of our users accessing Twitter from a mobile device, it’s important for us to be able to test on mobile”, explained Roetter. “Over time, you’ll continue to see us test and introduce new features first on mobile. For example, we recently introduced the people button which suggests accounts for you to follow.”

With the recent improvements, Twitter has become more visual, as some of us may have already noticed; there is more emphasis on pictures, the timeline expands horizontally, not only vertically like it did until now, and the “following” and “ followers” sections adopt a card design approach.

Photo sharing and editing have also become easier. Now you can crop your photos by selecting an aspect, such as square or wide. You can rotate an image before you share it to make sure it fits nicely in your Tweet. And when you upload a photo of people, you’ll see a reminder to @mention your friends so they can see your photo too.

Additionally, if you scroll down on your home timeline to refresh it and there are no new Tweets to load, some recommended Tweets may show up like trending topics and suggestions for new accounts to follow. You’ll see TV, sports and news events updates as well.

The new design tweaks are meant to ease interaction between users, prompt to meaningful conversation and allow seamless navigation through the tweets stream.

From a real estate professional’s perspective, these changes are more than welcomed. When it comes to using Twitter as a tool to advertise apartments for example, pictures can do the job a thousand times better than a 140-character tweet.

For an enhanced Twitter experience, consider integrating hyperlinks in your tweets as it will take customers directly to your site. You can shorten long URLs through third party services, such as Hootsuite or bitly, which will give your tweets more text space for a coherent message. Also of great assistance, TweetDeck is a tool that can help you organize your timeline, schedule tweets/retweets, keep track of lists, searches, activity and more – all in one interface.

In addition to connecting you with prospective customers, Twitter can help build relationships with peers, service providers and other professionals in your business. A great example of a successful social media campaign is Commercial Property Executive’s weekly live chat on Twitter. Not only is the #cpechat a great way to keep up with the latest real estate trends and technology, it also provides a direct communication channel with the industry’s most trusted leaders.

Probably the most important thing is to keep your Twitter page alive. Post relevant updates at least three times a day, reply to comments and engage in fruitful conversations with your followers. Because what better way to drive engagement than by being actively engaged yourself?!

What about you? Are you using Twitter for business?