Happy 10th Birthday, Twitter!

Twitter was founded a decade ago, in March 2006. Over the years, the social network has grown and launched innovative services such as Vine or Periscope, floated its stock, and today has 300 million users posting on average 500 million tweets a day. Yet over the last few weeks, the social media has been flooded with alarmist hashtags such as #RIPTwitter which, by generating 1.2 million tweets, forced Jack Dorsey himself to reassure users about the future of Twitter. Two announcements, one a few months after the other, created this wave of worry and discontent. First, the intention to eliminate the 140-character limit, which for many is Twitter's very identity. Second, the news that Twitter is planning to eliminate its chronological timeline in favor of an algorithmic timeline, which would show tweets on the basis of users' forecasted interests. The fear worrying millions of people is that Twitter will lose its identity and become an imitation of Facebook.

So at the very moment marking its first decade, Twitter is going through its most vulnerable phase, with many top executives abandoning ship amidst a swirl of indiscretion that certainly does not reassure customers and investors about the future of the company. Under siege by its archenemy Facebook (which recently announced to have reached $1 billion in quarterly earnings) and younger, faster-growing social networks like Instagram, Twitter seems to be searching for a business model capable of generating those profits that can push the value of its stock up.

Until now, the business model has been based on the sale of advertising space. Twitter offers a range of advertising options, from sponsored tweets to sponsored trends and accounts. But in the case of Twitter, this source of revenue seems unable to generate profits in line with investors' expectations. Also, users are unhappy about having increasing portions of their timelines occupied by advertising. The challenge for the future of Twitter is thus to find an alternative business model which does not rely on advertising revenues. The hashtag #SaveTwitter launched a few days ago by Italian users had the aim of finding alternative solutions. Let's try to sketch out one.

While other social media are used as a sort of public diary where one registers daily, largely private events, consumers mainly use Twitter to express their views. For instance, Twitter is the place you go to provide an opinion on a new product or a new movie. Therefore, Twitter is sitting on a data mine which is unique with respect to other social networks. Until now, it has merely sold data to firms, leaving to them the task of analyzing them. But Twitter could now use these data to provide consulting services. For example, the social network has sufficient data to monitor brand equity at the city level. Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings (the service the enables monitoring the liking of a TV program by looking at the tweets it generates) certainly goes in this direction. Twitter could find a new gold vein by offering a similar service to other actors: companies, movie studios, sports teams, etc. This is a solution that is less intrusive than advertising and has a two-fold advantage. On the one hand, it would make Twitter more attractive to users, who would be very happy to see less ads on their timelines. On the other, Big Data could be mined innovatively, not simply to target consumers, but to give firms high-value services