Mid last year, we reported that Twitter had updated their homepage so as to lure more users. This however was limited to a few users and finally it has been launched to several countries.
Twitter rolled out the new homepage to 23 new countries including Kenya. “Every month, over 500 million people visit Twitter to see what’s happening around the world” they explained in their blog “we’re excited to announce improvements to twitter.com that will bring those great tweets to even more people across the globe.”
The homepage is intended to be dangling bait for the billions of internet users out there who are not part of Twitter’s active user base. The bait consists of a tagline that is rather inviting “See what is happening right now” complete with several categories of interests that may contain tweets a newbie might be interested in. The tweets shown are mainly from high profile users and this is why Twitter takes them seriously by not showing ads to some of them
Apart from the already curated categories, logged out users can also search around Twitter thanks to the search button. The activity logged in by Twitter coupled with your location will be used by the company to tailor stories just for you which sort of reminds you with what Facebook does with their News Feed.
This is a huge step by the company since:
- Their growth has stagnated where they only gained 4 million new active users in a quarter to 320 million and desperately need to jump-start their active user base growth curve.
- The logged out user base is way bigger than the logged in active user base and therefore gives the company a bigger outlet to serve more ads and generate more revenue
We have to wait and see if this move by the company will have an impact in forthcoming quarterly announcements as they continue to roll the updated homepage to other countries.
