Some companies succeed by innovating, continually improving product quality, and listening to their customers. And some succeed despite not doing any of those things.
Twitter is in the second camp. Despite choosing to squander development time building a new, preschool-ish, wildly unpopular user interface (UI) rather than fixing functionality gaps that become more glaring the longer they go unaddressed, the company reported surprisingly strong second-quarter financial results. Both revenue and earnings per share (EPS) exceeded expectations.
The trend in user growth is a bit more difficult to parse, since the company switched to using a metric called “monetizable daily active users” (mDAUs) rather than the more common active user metrics reported by other social platforms. Though Twitter says mDAUs are a more accurate reflection of performance, the switch has been questioned by analysts recently and in the past.
In the B2B world, Twitter and LinkedIn reign as the most effective social media channels. B2B marketers rely on Twitter to be a leading source of traffic to blog posts, events, case studies, and asset download pages, as well as a vital channel for influencer marketing. But as the missteps pile up while obvious gaps remain unfixed, those marketers are concerned about the longer term.
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