How Twitter's Positioning As A News App Could Make Sense

Twitter has been struggling to garner new users in the last few quarters; its user base grew by just over 2% year-over-year (y-o-y) in the first quarter this year, compared to 4.2% growth in 2015 and 23% growth in 2014. In a bid to reverse this trend, improve visibility and target the mobile app better, Twitter moved its app from the “Social Networking” category to the “News” category in Apple’s App Store in April. The change in category helped the micro-blogging app move up to the number #1 position (in the “News” category) from #5 in Social Networking.

This move made sense, as first-time users may be more likely to try out a top-ranked app in a particular category, so it could potentially help Twitter add new users. The only difference is that the target audience has changed somewhat, to people who are interested in news apps rather than social media interactions. This move still seems somewhat tentative, considering Twitter did not re-position itself on Google Play, where it is still categorized as a social networking app.

Marketing itself as a news app seems to be based on the fact that a lot of Twitter’s regular users visit specifically to consume news (read, comment, share) as opposed to connecting with friends. This seems to have been validated by Pew Research Center’s latest survey results, which showed that 59% of Twitter’s users get their news from the micro-blogging platform and a solid 54% of them can be categorized as News Seekers as opposed to those who chance upon news items while looking for other things.  

In comparison, only 38% of Facebook users consuming news can be categorized as News Seekers even though 66% of its users get their news from the website. This essentially means that a greater proportion of Twitter users use the platform for news consumption than Facebook, LinkedIn (10%) or Instagram (9%).

Positioning Twitter as a News app could help the company improve its user engagement by making news a primary focus. To improve users’ reading experience, Twitter could also allow users to post longer posts (exceeding 140 characters) and introduce something similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles for publishers to post their articles directly on Twitter. This would offer a superior experience to users who currently have to read detailed news either by going to the source website (by clicking on web links in Twitter posts) or using Twitter’s Quick Read feature which currently does not allow multimedia content. Introducing new features for news-seeking users could help transform Twitter from an aggregator of news links to a comprehensive news platform with the advantage of live feeds, breaking news and open discussion forums.

This could also mark a shift from the existing singular focus on user additions towards better monetization of its existing user base. Considering that there is still massive potential to increase revenue per user, profit margins and cash flow generation for Twitter, its positioning as a top-ranked news app could make a lot of sense.

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