Twitter Inc. on Thursday announced a redesign of the micro-blogging service and new features to help widen its appeal.
In the biggest announcement since Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s creator, returned to the company as an executive in March, the company said that when people first sign up to use the service, Twitter will help them discover information that might interest them, based on their location and other signals.
“It’s not just a visual redesign but a conceptual redesign to make Twitter more accessible to the next billion users,” said Satya Patel, a Twitter senior executive, at an event inside the San Francisco-based company’s future headquarters in an Art Deco building in a blighted neighborhood here.
The redesign, which will roll out globally over the next few weeks, will add a section to every Twitter user’s account called “Stories” that shows them content on Twitter they may find interesting. “It’s the first step to start to surface all the rich content that’s pouring into the platform for people who are experiencing it for the first time,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said.
Twitter, which lets people broadcast messages called “tweets” of up to 140 characters in length, is attempting to become an online-advertising powerhouse but still faces challenges including the perception that many people don’t understand how to use the service, which includes symbols such as “@” and “#,” and don’t know what kind of information they can view on it. People use Twitter to keep up with the latest news about everything from technology and politics to transportation delays and promotions by big retailers.
The company recently said more than 100 million people actively use Twitter. The majority of its accounts are based overseas, the company has said.
In August the company raised money at a valuation of more than $8 billion and now has more than 700 employees, who will move into the new headquarters in mid-2012. Its fledgling online-ad business is expected to generate around $145 million this year, according to research firm eMarketer, as brands such as Starbucks Corp., luxury-brand giant LVMH and others dip their toes into Twitter’s ad products, which aims to target ads based on people’s personal interests. That revenue figure is up from $45 million last year.
Mr. Dorsey, who was Twitter’s first chief executive and has long been chairman of its board, said that, on average, between 3% to 5% of people interact with, or “engage,” with ads they see on Twitter. That figure is higher than many other forms of online advertising.
The five-year-old Twitter is competing with other social media companies such as social network Facebook Inc. for the attention of marketers. Mr. Costolo said Thursday that the company is testing a long-awaited “self-serve” system that lets anyone buy ads on Twitter, similar to the kind of system that propelled Google Inc.’s growth, and that it would become available more broadly next year.
Twitter on Thursday also announced that brands such as American Express and organizations such as the American Red Cross will soon be able to customize their publicly-viewable Twitter pages to have more control of how they look.
The company has leased 220,000 square feet in its future headquarters, a space that “holds thousands of people,” Mr. Costolo said.
- The Wall Street Journal
