CASE STUDY- TWITTER
Liani Lyttle
Liberty University- BUSI 690
June 18, 2021
CASE STUDY- TWITTER
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Introduction
Kenichi Ohmae states, "No matter what it takes, the goal of the strategy is to beat the
competition. (Crafting and executing strategy, Pg.49) Business analysis is detailed and
disciplined research conducted to identify business needs and determine solutions to business
issues. Solutions include software systems development, process improvements, organizational
change, strategic planning, and policy developments.
When analyzing Twitter, Inc., we find there are certain areas of improvement and growth.
Some history includes; Twitter was founded in 2006, they desire to be the leading source of
information for the world (Black, 2010). Twitter prides themselves in having over 330 million
active users, and they hold their place as a top leading organization in the social media world.
Twitter is constantly seeking improvement and growth in order to remain relevant in the social
media world. Twitter, Inc. depends heavily on a steady strategic management system. They focus
on minimizing costs while maximizing their profits. Twitter proudly announces and upkeep its
goal in providing its customers international exposure. Companies that use Twitter, Inc. as an
advertisement platform have a significant percentage of reaching a broad audience.
Twitter, Inc. is a social network platform established by a group of programmers who
worked at the podcasting company Odea in San Francisco. Their users can look and find real-
time information, breaking news, etc. The primary source of income for this organization is
advertising. In 2018 they held a revenue of approximately 3.46 billion dollars.
Throughout this analysis, we will examine the company's strategies to find any growth
points internally and externally to ensure Twitter, Inc. continue to grow and remain relevant and
impactful in their business area:
1. We will examine the organization's business model with a SWOT analysis.
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2. We will research and dive deep into the organization's previous financial statements to
find the areas of probability and those areas they can cut back on.
3. The goal will be to establish new avenues and strategies that can be offered to this
organization.
Twitters Existing Mission
Twitter, Inc. is a massive social network that accounts for approximately 330 million users
worldwide from 13 to 50+ years of age. It is a free platform that is accessible via twitter.com.
Twitter is available in more than forty languages worldwide. Twitters announced their mission to
be using their power to strengthen the communities through their platform, people, and profits.
Twitter's Exiting Objective
Their focus areas include internet safety and education, freedom of speech and civil liberties,
equality, environmental conservation and sustainability, and crisis and emergency response.
Twitter strives to provide a safe place for healthy conversations. They are an open platform to a
world of diverse people, conversations, ideas, and information. They are committed to protecting
the health of those public conversations. Twitter works diligently to ensure they are minimizing
harmful and illegal content. They spend much time keeping individuals with lousy intent from
creating or maintaining accounts that compromise the accounts of others and boost harmful
content. They are committed to fostering free and international conversations.
Twitter's Existing Strategy
Twitter seeks to invest in global operations that will expand its audience and marketing
platform. Twitter is committed to having a workforce made of "amazing people" worldwide who
are using their service daily. They focus on being a diverse and all-inclusive organization.
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Twitter's New Mission
Twitter has been insistent on cultivating a social media platform that provides a safe
place to express one's feelings and opinions. However, they have also stated that they will
monitor to ensure that they remove anything harmful to another. This brings a line that
contradicts their want to provide a platform that encourages freedom of speech. It would be
recommended that Twitter make its mission more candid and better articulated.
In the modern-day, balancing freedom of speech and false information or harassment on online
platforms is becoming critical (Balasubramanian, Fang & Yang, 2020). They allow users to
express their opinions and thoughts while gingerly reminding them that the said item would
allow users to express their freedom and clarify any gray areas. Changing the mission to one that
is more direct would avoid headaches in the long haul; instead, continue to leave their mission
vague and open to anyone's interpretation.
From a business point of view and financial support, Twitter relies heavily on companies
using their platform for advertisement. Social media marketing can be a dynamic powerhouse
that solidifies branding, creates quality client relationships, and drives sales. Twitter should make
advertisement posts more easily accessible, and currently, if the audience is not online, they will
miss the tweets. In addition, Twitter needs to find a way of streamlining and making account
management more user-friendly. Currently, making a Twitter account effective is rather time-
consuming and a full-time job, especially for businesses that want to use Twitter's platform as a
marketing tool. Continuously trying to maintain a stable audience requires an abundant amount
of time and dedication. Due to this, many organizations chose a different, more user-friendly
social media platform provider. Additionally, videos are not currently allowed to be uploaded.
Visual content is always more attractive, especially as a marketing tool.
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Clients
Twitter's clients average to be approximately 330 Million users. 24% are males. 22%
U.S adults, they have 262 Million international; Twitter users. 77% of American that makes over
$75, 000 utilize Twitter. 80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials.
Products and Services
Twitter, Inc. offers various products for users, advertisers, developers, and data
partners. Some of these products and services include Twitter Periscope, Promoted Tweets,
Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends. The top three countries outside of the USA that
utilize Twitter are Japan, Brazil, and India.
Markets
Social Media demographics and markets change frequently. Twitter's market and population
are younger, wealthier, and more educated than the average American. In addition, Twitter's
markets stretch globally. Twitter has made it clear that they strive to have a diverse market
encounter and population. Because of this, Twitter faces heavy international competition.
Technology
Twitter is a microblogging system. This means that it allows the user to send and receive short
posts, defines as tweets. These tweets can be up to 140 characters long and may include links to
relevant website sources.
Concern for survival, growth, and profitability
Twitter’s advertising revenue in 2020 totaled 562 million, which was a decrease of 22% year
over year. Their cost per engagement decreased by 25% in 2020. Overall, Twitter has an overall
operating loss of $124 million in 2020. Twitter has spent much of its time battling declining
usage and cutting bots, spam, and another negative factor from its platform. The hope is that
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improving the overall platform leads to a better experience for their current users and attracts
more users. Twitter’s advertisement revenue seems to be growing. However, it can use a facelift
and extra incentive to choose this platform for its marketing needs.
Philosophies
Twitter’s core values or philosophies include internet safety and education. Twitters
does this by supporting organizations that fight for online safety against bullying, abuse, and hate
speech. Another philosophy includes free expression and civil liberties. Equality and acceptance
are all humans are one of Twitter’s most remarkable and more values philosophy. Equality and
universal acceptance for everyone is another cherished twitter philosophy. Twitter partners with
organizations dedicated to promoting equal opportunity in science, technology, engineering, arts,
and math. Twitter also believes in environmental conservation and sustainability. Twitter works
with NGOs internationally to raise awareness and encourage actions to protect the environment.
Their final philosophy includes crisis and emergency response. Twitter offers tools and resources
to assist people in communicating and obtain a humanitarian response when emergencies and
natural disasters occur.
Self- Concept
Twitter prides themselves in the level of diversity they have within their users. They work
to establish themselves as a haven for free speech and no boundaries communication. They
encourage their users to be creative and precise in their messages.
Public Image
Twitter has positioned itself as the “what is happening in the world and what are people talking
about right now.” Users rely on them for real-time news. They have also established themselves
as a public self-expression media that provides conversation opportunities in real-time.
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Employee Concern
Twitter actively seeks to promote diversity and talent for its employees. They seek for
their employees to join them on their journey to becoming the world’s most diverse, inclusive,
and accessible tech company. They want a workforce that looks like the amazing people of
different backgrounds and abilities worldwide who use their social media platform.
Businesses Model
Twitter is one of the most popular and well-utilized social media platforms. It is a
microblogging service that helps bridge its users to remain in contact with the world virtually. Its
business model revolves around a range of products and services. It monetizes its user base via
advertising and data licensing.
Ironically Twitter arose from a failed startup named Ode, which was an initial SMS
platform. The Twitter business model involves paying different brands, services, and partnerships
for promotion. However, Twitter's business model depends on its customer base.
Twitter's partnership is, first and foremost, their users. Additionally, Twitter has
developed business partnerships with several startups and well-established corporations that
assist the symbiotic relationship of Twitter.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths: Based on Twitter's analysis, we find that they hold various strengths. The
amount of users they have reflects the power and influence they possess. Second, Twitter allows
for its followers to obtain information using items such as hashtags and trending items. The
hashtags of Twitter are the most influential and impactful features any social media site provides
(Desai & Mehta, 2016). This allows users to obtain relevant and timely information. Third, they
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are well known for their brand and logo. Fourth, Twitter provides a healthy work environment
that makes employment desirable and makes longevity easy to ascertain. Finally, Twitter openly
states that they welcome diversity. This allows their users to feel welcomed and valued.
Weakness: Some of Twitter's weaknesses include its constant struggle with fake
accounts, bots, and misleading information. These items impact the trust of their users. Because
Twitter is a social media platform, they are left open for negative implications such as trolling,
harassment, and possible hacking. Twitter rewards quantity, not quality; therefore, the average
lifespan of a tweet is about one hour. If a user posts something important at the wrong time of
day, your post may go unseen.
Opportunities: the opportunities within this SWOT analysis way for Twitter to remain
relevant, competitive, and valuable. If Twitter can work out some of the kinks, they have the
potential to become a trusted and dominant form of communication for their customers. Many
organizations and celebrities currently utilize twitter; should they campaign the presence of these
idols, they can utilize those partnerships to support and empower their movements and goals.
Providing more telecom operators will allow organizations and users to feel confident in
Twitter's presence with troubleshooting their issues, especially of the selected Twitter as a
marketing platform. All these items can assist Twitter in strengthening its presence. Creating a
store much like amazon for their customer's items would be something that other social media
platforms do not have.
Threats: Obvious threats for Twitter include other social media platforms such as
Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram (Desai & Mehta, 2016). These threats depend on the user's
satisfaction with Twitter's platform. Twitter is heavy on encouraging free speech; however,
Twitter faces limitations from areas like the government or movements that pressure different
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parties to censor and audit tweets which will contradict what Twitter is advertising to allow free
speech. Fake accounts provide a risk to Twitter users of being hacked; misleading information
taints the trust in how reliable Twitter's information is and adds a layer of doubt that can cost
them, active users.
Porter's five forces analysis
The porter five forces are:
•
Threat of New Entrants
•
Bargaining Power of suppliers
•
Bargaining Power of Buyers
•
Threat Substitute Products
•
Rivalry among the existing players
Twitter can fight the new entrants again by innovating new products or services if they
build capacities and spend money on research and new developments. On the other hand, new
entrants will be less likely to enter such a dynamic industry and hold their ground against an
established player such as Twitter if they make moves to remain relevant.
Twitter can fight against the bargaining power of suppliers by experimenting with product
designs utilizing different materials that should price increase; they can change to a different one.
Work on building an efficient supply chain with multiple users.
Twitter can fight against the bargaining power of buyers by establishing a broad base of
customers. As a result, it reduces the bargaining powers of the buyers while providing an
opportunity to streamline their sales and production process. In addition, should Twitter invest in
innovating new products, it lowers the bargaining power of the buyers.
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Twitter can fight against substitute products/ services by understanding the core need of
the customer. Ensure Twitter is service orientated somewhat, just product orientated.
Twitter can stand against intense rivalry amount existing competitors by building a scale that can
compete better than others. Collaborating with their competitors increases the market size rather
than competing for a small market.
By analyzing all five forces, Twitter can gain a complete picture of what impacts the
profitability of their organization within their industry. In addition, this analysis can identify
game-changing trends at their early state so they can quickly respond and react to the
opportunities.
PESTLE Analysis:
Political: Political factors play a significant role in Twitter's long-term profits in certain
countries or markets. Because Twitter operates in more than one dozen countries and exposes
itself to various forms of political environments and system risks, some of these impacts include
censorship of its user's tweets.
Economic: Different factors such as inflation rates, saving rates, interest rates, foreign
exchange rates, and economic cycles determine Twitter's aggregated demand and investments in
the economy. Twitter may use the country's economic factors such as growth rates, inflation, and
indicators such as internet information provider industry growth rate, consumer spending to
forecast their growth trajectory.
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Social: Twitter has a very diverse social presence. Society's culture and manner of doing
things impact the culture of their organization. Their communications could be impacted based
on the culture they are communicating with.
Technological: Twitter's technology quickly requires automation and creativity if they
wish to remain relevant in their industry. They currently have a few technological disruptions or
lacks. Advertising their mobile app and enhancing those features, and advertising their marketing
platforms for their customers will help their profits and reputation.
Legal: Twitter often faces free speech dilemmas. One vital area that raises policy and
legal issues for Twitter includes cyberstalking. Twitter has faced various issues of defamation,
impersonation of privacy concerns. Additionally, various legal forces impact Twitter. Twitter's
current policies and practices are often impacted and threaten these changes becoming harmful to
the organization. Twitter has to ensure they are with all legal bounds globally.
Environmental: Twitter is very active and pro-environment. They have many
partnerships and opportunities to launch campaigns that will help, support, and bring awareness
to environmental needs. One area that they can improve in is creating power-efficient data
centers. They have an opportunity to lead by example.
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Appendix:
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Weakness
Opportunities
Threats
1. It is one of the
early market
entrants
2. Speedy and
concise
updates have
enable twitter
to become a
popular social
media
platform
3. Twitter has a
strong brand
name
4. Twitter has
more than 300
million active
users
internationall
y
5. Hashtag and
trending
topics are all
features of
Twitter which
have become
very popular
among users
6. It is the
preferred
social media
platform by
organizations
and celebrities
7. Twitter
houses over
3000
employees
8. Diverse
1. Fake
accounts and
bots
2. Data leaks
3. Numerous
competitors
4. Lower
revenues in
comparison
to
competitors
5. False in
formation
and misleads
6. High
operational
expenses
7. Content
lifespan
8. Limited
characters for
tweets
1. Twitter has the
opportunity to
become a
dominant form
of
communicatio
n with their
customers
2. Uniting more
celebrities and
organizations
to build a
credible
account
3. Integrate more
telecom
operators
4. Establish a
strong and
relevant
presence
5. Hiring more
talented
employees to
avoid burnout
and provide
new insight for
organization
6. Create new
channels or
community for
their users
7. Mobile- based
ads
8. Online stores
1. Competition
2. Suppression
of speech
3. New
upcoming
social
networking
websites
4. Fake
accounts
5. Government
policies
against
internet and
social media
platforms
6. Unequal
power of
influence
7. Scandals
8. Data leaks or
hacks
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organization
TOWS Analysis:
SO Strategies:
Revenue growth
Loyalty of consumers
Technology capabilities
Innovative research
ST Strategies:
Consumer loyalty over other platforms
Partnership retention
Cut down the amount of restrictions to the Twitter platform
WO Strategies:
Data preserving
WT Strategies
Policies to protect accounts
Policies to protect users freedom of speech
Stronger firewalls to avoid hacks
1.
Impact
of
social
media
on
the
political
landscape
2.
Action
by
governments
to
restrict
access to
products
and
services
or
censor
content
1.
Fast
development
of
e-commerce
and
growing
competitions.
1.
Internet
driving
shift
in
communication
channels
1.
Increase
in
popularity
of
mobile
apps and
marketing
2.
Artificial
intelligence
(Al)
and machine
learning
1.
Legal
risks
include
defamations,
Impersonation
or
malicious
tweets
2.
Privacy
and
government
regulations
globally
1.
Promotion
of
environment
campaigns
and
products
2.
Power
consumption
of
data
centres
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PESTLE Analysis:
