While some individuals might think that saving Twitter is a far cry but CEO Jack Dorsey is of the opinion that they have a long way to go. The same was the agenda of the discussion between Dorsey and Twitter COO and CFO Anthony Noto on stage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference in San Francisco. The top executives of the micro-blogging platform talked about the company’s missions, current performance status and increasing use of AI to solve user growth problems.
Twitter has always been a primary source of information for the social online crowd. And Dorsey reiterated that it still stands by its mission of being the real-time information platform it has always been. People turn to Twitter when they’re willing to discuss latest political, sports, entertainment and other news.
But, it has now become the hotbed for propagating info about America’s political life, especially because of U.S President Trump’s eccentric and illogical tweets. Talking about the same, Dorsey mentions that it isn’t the first time Twitter is seeing such a phenomenon play out on the platform. Twitter has always been at the center of important conservations and it’s just that it is now being used more prominently. He then continued to add,
A lot of the same patterns we’ve seen during the Iranian Green Revolution and the Arab Spring. It was stunning to see how Twitter was being used to have a conversation about the government, with the government.
The platform has continued to stick with its guts when it comes to instant news coverage (also evident from its live broadcast strategy). And this seems to be working in favor of the company as it attracted more than 5.1 million unique visitors during the Grammys last weekend. It also saw a massive 30 percent uptick in adjusted profit margins from the company’s foray into NFL broadcasting, coupled with live tweets.
The micro-blogging platform, Noto says, now intends to double its live streaming efforts during 2017. And this is further expected to attract advertisers, adding to their revenue stream as well. But, the said growth is expected to come in the next six to twelve months as the company is known to hold a higher standard than its competition. Twitter is known to set the bar much higher, which has often reflected in quarterly earning reports.
Further, Dorsey expanded on the company’s efforts to elicit growth in user numbers on their widely-used platform. And the CEO reiterated his recent strategy, which involves relying on AI-driven personalisation to make Twitter feel easy to use and attract users. On stage, he said that the company is increasing its dependency on machine learning to tailor the experience based on the user’s interests.
The application of the same can be seen in the recently introduced ‘Explore’ tab in place of Moments. This new feature now enables you to switch to this single, go-to place for new content after they’ve exhausted going through content in their feeds. It will contain stuff like trends, Moments, search, and featured live video streams. Further, talking about the same, he adds,
[Twitter is] still the best place to get a sense of what’s going on in the world … but as we get better and better at applying machine learning and AI to our system, which we really haven’t done in the past — it’s been very mechanical — it gets easier and easier, and we believe that topics and interests are a big part of that future to make it easier.
Dorsey offered only the aforementioned info about the company’s efforts to use AI and make Twitter more attractive to users. But, he has recently also tried making the service more attractive to investors by buying $7 billion worth of stock himself. This has reiterated his focus and commitment towards the platform, which won’t go for an acquisition anytime soon (as has been the case last year).
