Slowing user growth at Twitter has the social network scrambling to make the service more appealing to users new and old. Twitter should start by streamlining the service, and doing a better job of allowing for photo- and video-sharing, according to recent survey data.
Former Twitter users reported that the top factor that would encourage them to return to the service was "better sorting and filtering tools with less clutter." This was the top response by a wide margin, cited by 80% of former Twitter users in the Deutsche Bank survey of some 1,100 Internet users (a subset were former and existing Twitter users.) The survey was conducted in March 2014.
The next most popular response, at 67%, was former users saying they'd consider coming back to Twitter if more of their friends joined the service.
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Since getting friends to join up presents a chicken-and-the-egg problem for Twitter, we expect Twitter to work especially hard in coming months to make the site and app easier to manage and navigate.
Already Twitter has made moves on this front, trying to better organize conversations so that users don't feel like they've walked into a discussion they don't understand.
The impetus to improve these features isn't just coming from former users.
Twitter has a devoted base of users, as the survey showed. Over half of Twitter users reported signing in at least once a day. But even current users expressed a similar desire for changes that would make Twitter more manageable.
The highest percentage of existing users (35%) said the tweak they were most interested in was tweets sorted by relevancy. This echoes the desire of former users for more filtering to help them avoid non-relevant tweets.
While Twitter's appeal and unique value may be based on its lack of an algorithm that privileges certain posts over others, the stream has clearly become too expansive for many users.
For its part, Deutsche Bank expressed optimism regarding Twitter's overall outlook saying, "We don’t know when Twitter’s MAU [Monthly Active Users] growth could accelerate, but we know the company is laser focused on this effort, and it’s not the most challenging problem we’ve seen facing a consumer Internet company."