Fab CEO Tweet Rant Reveals Key Twitter Weakness

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By Ben Myers

Twitter on iPhone screen
Twitter profile on iPhone 5s

One of the biggest downsides of throwing stones at other people is the fact that you have to watch the glass sidings of your house as you throw stones. While Twitter shareholder and Fab CEO Jason Goldberg might be roundly criticized as being in no position to judge Twitter’s strategic mistakes given Fab’s own ailing financial health-it has laid off several rounds of employees-Goldberg’s recent 44 tweet rant on the strategic direction of Twitter is worth paying attention to.

It is no secret that Twitter is driven by Facebook’s strategy of monetizing its space. Facebook’s been aggressively trying to squeeze as much cash out of every inch of digital real estate in front of its huge number of eyeballs. As I have written about earlier, it appears Facebook’s suppressing free fan page organic traffic so it can push more and more businesses to pay for official FB advertising. So far, this strategy is working as evidenced by Facebook advertising revenue’s healthy upward trajectory. Twitter is trying to do the same by capturing space on the feeds of its 280 million plus active users. This is a problematic approach because there’s a huge gulf of difference between Facebook and Twitter in terms of engagement time, scale, and content consumption depth.
Goldberg says the better approach would be to monetize the usage of Twitter instead of focusing on monetizing its users. He sees Twitter’s main value as an effective ‘one to many’ communication platform. Twitter users can be made to pay for media stored on such a massive distribution platform. Think of Twitter as a movie or file server serving content platform. This idea might have legs. Twitter, after all, is a great platform for making ideas, causes, and content go viral. Why not leverage this capability by plugging it into branded media created both by established brands and new and upcoming companies. Considering how cutthroat the startup space is, being able to use Twitter to get your new brand established might just be worth it.
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