The Death of Twitter?

While most social media sites seem to have exponential growth, Twitter is the exception. From quarter 1 to quarter 2 in 2015, the number of users only rose by 2 million (from 302 to 304 million) – the lowest growth rate it has had in many years. Does this mean Twitter is dying out? If so, why?

A few years ago, Twitter was the new trend on everyone’s radar. Its short form of 140 characters or less was revolutionary, and was quickly taken up by many popular personalities and brands, and predictably snubbed by many old-fashioned, stuck-in-their-way personalities. But now, it seems Twitter has fallen behind the times. These days, there are new Kings of short-form communication – Snapchat and Vine. Snapchat’s appeal is similar to Twitter’s – a limitation on the content you share. Twitter limited characters of text, while Snapchat limits how long an image is shown to a friend. Similarly, Vine limits their videos to only 6 seconds.

Perhaps with these new ways of communicating in short form and new challenges being presented, Twitter seems out-dated and boring. The site has changed very little in recent years, and is not particularly user friendly because of this. It can also be seen as a very niche market – many people are not interested in short text bursts from others. Images are much more important these days – photo sharing on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and video sharing on YouTube, Instagram and Vine go from strength to strength.

Twitter also struggles as it has minimal advertising space, and so cannot benefit from ads in the same way that many other social sites do. This problem will cause them more and more problems as time goes on and they lose out of advertising revenue.

Twitter has also had issues in recent years due to its lack of real name policy. Twitter is known, more so than other sites, for its abundance of ‘trolls’. Twitter users receive far larger amounts of abuse, prejudice and death threats than any other site as there is no accountability for its users. You can be anyone you like on Twitter with no consequences, and this leads to people hiding behind anonymity.

But perhaps it is too pre-emptive to worry about the death of Twitter. People have been worrying about the death of Twitter for as long as the site has existed. Despite this, Twitter is still popular. Its growth may be slowing, but it is still growing. Ultimately, Twitter has nothing to worry about just yet.