Twitter was founded by Biz Stone, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams on March 21, 2006. The first tweet was made by Jack Dorsey at 9:50 PM on 21 March, 2006 and it was as follows: “just setting up my twittr”. Twitter became an important product of its time and contributed to the “a massive social experiment” that occurred with the rise of Web 2.0 (Meyer, 2016). The popularity did not come quickly to this micro-blogging platform. In 2006 it published 5,000 tweets, in 2008 – 300,000 tweets, in 2010 – 50 million, in 2013 – 500 million a day (Lewis, 2016). Now Twitter does not provide the information concerning the number of tweets per day and it seems that Twitter’s popularity does not grow any more.
In the late 2000s there were many technological advances and internet became easily accessible thanks to the different kinds of portable gadgets including smart phones. People started to communicate online and Twitter eventually grew into the platform that is more than just a social network. In politics, media, pop-culture Twitter is an important medium of communication that influences millions of people. Interestingly, the founders did not think that Twitter would be used in politics and lead to the change of the political regimes in some countries. One of the founders, Evan Williams, compared Twitter to “ice cream—more fun than useful” (Heppermann, 2013, p.12). Nowadays, the purposes of Twitter are very different. There are 320 million active users and many pop stars, politicians and ordinary people among them (Lewis, 2016).
The main idea of Twitter is that the users can post short 140-character messages that can include the links to the web-sites, hashtags, and attached photos or videos. Now Twitter has the following mission: “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” (Twitter, 2016).
For several years while the popularity of smart-phones and other portable devices was rising, the popularity of Twitter was rising too. Nowadays, 80% of users use Twitter from portable devices (Twitter, 2016). However, now the company is facing many challenges and the most important one of them is what the purpose of Twitter should be. In the first years Twitter was fun to use and connected users with celebrities, but now it looks very different and many brands use it for advertising and communication with the customers (Lewis, 2016). More importantly, it is used by many as a tool for pursuing the political goals. In several countries Twitter was used for spreading the news about the protests against the totalitarian regimes and governments in Moldova, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. Now Twitter is used by the ISIS supporters and since mid-2015 Twitter had to intervene and delete 125,000 accounts (Lewis, 2016). What is more, Twitter cannot cope with “astroturfing” when troll houses imitate the grass-roots opinion (Lewis, 2016).
So Twitter continues to provide a platform for a mix of all kinds of tweets from around the world. 79% accounts are outside of the USA and therefore the company had to open 35 offices overseas in order to make Twitter even more global (Twitter, 2016). However, in some countries Twitter is blocked. China, North Korea, Iran and several other countries do not allow access to some social networks for the security reasons.
A lot of countries with undemocratic political regimes are afraid that people will use the social networks in order to undermine the political stability. There are plenty of examples how Twitter was used to spread the news about the protests and uprisings during the Arab Spring in 2011. Steinert-Threlkeld et al. analyzed almost 14 million of the geolocated tweets and data on the protests in sixteen countries during the Arab Spring and saw the correlation between the tweets and the protests the next day (Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015, p.1). In Tunisia and Egypt the protests led to the resignation of the presidents and in Libya and Syria the protests resulted in the beginning of the civil wars. Twitter and other social networks helped the individuals to make sure that there were many people who wanted to protest and thus the risk of being arrested by the police forces during the protest would decline. At the same time, the states learnt how to control information technology and how to use it to track the participants in protest (Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015, p.8). During the Arab Spring in many countries where there was a political unrest, Twitter did not operate properly and the access was limited. In 2011, the company reported many interruptions, but could not influence the situation.
For Twitter censorship and blocking represents a threat, because the company can lose its very large markets due to the preventive governments’ decisions. According to the Annual Report of 2015, the company would like to focus on detecting the abusive accounts and improving the overall user experience. In the global context, it would like to grow in the following international markets: Argentina, Brazil, France, Philippines, India and Japan. Twitter has “democratized content creation and distribution” (Twitter Annual Report, 2016) and now the audience for Twitter consists of the logged-in user and the wider global audience. This platform will be also used by the media outlets that look for the new distribution channels. At the global and local level the company is going to continue to offer the Promoted Products that consist of Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends (Twitter Annual Report, 2016).
In order to increase the global sales, the company employs a large sales force and sales support staff. In the company’s Annual Report it was written that “if we (Twitter) fail to expand effectively in international markets, our revenue and our business will be harmed” (Twitter Annual Report, 2016). Consequently, there are many major challenges in providing some advertising products and features in the international markets including the European Union because of the different government regulations. Nevertheless, despite the very strong presence overseas, 65% of the revenues are generated in the local U.S. market (Twitter Annual Report, 2016). Therefore, the company remains to be very vulnerable to the international environment and should rely on the strong U.S. market in order to avoid the problems with the financial performance.
References
Heppermann, C. (2013). Twitter: The Company and Its Founders. Technology Pioneers.
Minneapolis, MN: Abdo Publishing.
Lewis, H. (4 March 2016). 10 Years on Twitter. Financial Times. Retrieved from
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/930b3e7c-e070-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889797.html
Meyer, R. (21 March 2016). Twitter Is 10. The Atlantic. Retrieved from
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/twitter-at-10/474561/
Steinert-Threlkeld, Z., Mocanu, D., Vespignani, A., Fowler, J. (2015). Online social networks
and offline protest. EPJ Data Science. Retrieved from http://fowler.ucsd.edu/online_social_networks_and_offline_protest.pdf
Twitter. (2016). Company Profile. Retrieved from https://about.twitter.com/company
Twitter, Inc. (2015) Annual Report - Form 10-K. Retrieved from
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000156459016013646/twtr-
10k_20151231.htm#Item_1A_RISK_FACTORS
