Twitter’s purchase of Vine is one of the few attempts to augment their current user base.
Snapchat, WhatsApp, Line, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and Kakoa are only a few competitors on the ever growing list of social network. The major social networks such as Facebook and Google+ have been able to fortify their position in social media due to their large user base and evolving network but Twitter on the other hand has been unable to keep up with the new changes and thus is falling behind in this social media competition.
A common theme among these younger social networks is to have a key feature that makes them distinct and then expand on that. An example would be Snapchat whose key feature is letting users send pictures and videos which disappear after the recipient views them. Snapchat which was launched in 2011 already processes 350 million posts a day in comparison with Twitter, which was launched in 2006, processes a slightly higher 500 million posts a day. Another social network WhatsApp is a messaging app that launched under five years ago already has 300 million active users in comparison with Twitter’s 218 million. In spite of growing competition Twitter has been relatively slow with making changes to their social network though they have made small changes modeled after the competition. One of these changes includes an increase of display for photos, similar to Facebook, in order to be more visible in a stream of messages.
In an effort to compete with the younger social networks and older competition Twitter has been making acquisitions of smaller companies to help advance their social network. Though Twitter failed to buy Instagram they were able to buy Vine, a video sharing app, which is now integrated into Twitter. Twitter has also purchase other companies to help expand Twitter’s features. The acquisition of We Are Hunted, a music service, will give users suggestions for music based on their tweets. Though these improvements will help Twitter compete with other social sites, the biggest problem is explaining why or what people should tweet. Out of all the social networks Twitter might have the hardest one to get started with simply because people don’t understand what to tweet. This issue has plagued Twitter unlike other networks like Pinterest and Snapchat where it is easy to find out what to do.
Regardless of these problems Twitter does still have some advantages such as being unmatched when it comes to sharing text messages and another being the well-crafted mobile experience. With the many new competitors in social networks and the many problems in Twitter’s network, they still have plenty of work to do to catch up with today’s social sites and even more work if they want to surpass them.
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