I logged into my Twitter this morning to respond to my messages and check trends as usual and boom! I figured that I've exceeded my DM limit and I've been left to wonder, "what alternatives are there?"
Our new landlord since buying the new property has come up with a number of policies. Twitter blue, post limit, and now message limit. In all fairness, $44 Billion dollars? I would definitely want to gain my money back. But come on! I need to respond to my DMs Elon.
NB: Though my intended audience are those that are familiar with Twitter, I will try to make this article as simple enough for anyone, who isn't, to understand.
Twitter is a social media platform used by individuals, businesses, and organisations to share news, information, and opinions. The platform, which boasts of 450 million monthly active users as of February 2023, allows users to post short messages, known as tweets. These tweets can be up to 280 characters long (much more for Twitter Blue users), and they can include text, images, videos, and links.
You can easily, by definition, place Twitter side by side with other social apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, and say, Instagram. But for the purpose of this article, that wouldn't do justice.
Why? Positioning.
While Twitter has been positioned as a microblogging platform to share ideas and happenings at a go, Facebook has been positioned as a platform to connect with old friends and keep tabs with what is going on with their lives, LinkedIn as a corporate space (more like a social media platform for serious corporate folks) and Instagram as the social media aesthetic base.
In case I'm not clear enough, consider these and answer truthfully:
- If there's a protest going on in your country and you want to know what is going on, where do you go? Twitter
- When you suddenly remember there was this classmate you had and want to know what is currently going on in their life, where do you go? Facebook
- When you just bag a degree or a promotion and you want to tell the world, where do you go? LinkedIn
- When you need flower ideas, skincare products, wedding fashion ideas, where do you go? Instagram
These guys are what I will call the vertical competitors.
Hence, the competitors I will be looking at are BlueSky, Truth Social and the recently hyped Thread. I call them the horizontal competitors. They are positioned to be exactly what Twitter is like, share ideas on the go, vibe with strangers.
What do they all have in common?
Well, technically, they've all failed. I don't have access to their actual numbers but the closest to Twitter in terms of active users is Truth Social.
This, however, isn't the only similarity.
They are all new, relatively. I can conveniently argue that they are all coming after Twitter had the market on chokehold.
From breaking news, to social movements to entertainment, charity, personal branding, Twitter has been present. In fact, do you know that as far back as 2009, Iranian citizens used Twitter to organise protest? It was used to coordinate the effort of protesters in Egypt during the Arab spring in 2011 as well.
Now, let us not lose sight of the matter of discourse that Twitter is, by far, older than all of these guys.
But guess what? Yes, you guessed right. There is someone older than Twitter, Nairaland. In fact, in the face of the choke, Nairaland still has about 30 million active users as at the time this article was published.
Nairaland is a Nigerian English-language internet forum and online community founded by Seun Osewa on March 8, 2005. At the moment, it has over 30 million registered users and is known for its discussion forums where people discuss topics including politics, religion, entertainment, and businesses.
The website features include blogs, polls, marketplace and a streaming service that offers a variety of Nigerian TV shows and movies.
So, why Nairaland? Well,
- Nairaland focuses mainly on the Nigerian users and still has that many users, 9%. Imagine what happens when it is positioned for foreign market.
- To iterate, it has about 30 million users
- Unlike the other competitors, it has been around since 2005.
What then would I have done? Optimise.
I would like to remind you that product management is an organisational function that involves taking a product from ideation to design, to development, to testing, launch, and then optimisation. Nairaland has refused to move to optimise and if I was a product manager, I would have sorted stakeholders' alignment to build a new version of the product and if they are scared that we will lose users, I will have made the newer version optional and accessible from the current one.