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Twitter Success Story
Updating the status of the current scenario is one of the leading trends followed by today's generation. The same trend allows people to describe their days, habits, thoughts, and any important message on a larger scale with the help of social media. There are multiple social media platforms available on the web to take the habit on. One amongst them is a bluebird icon platform called Twitter.
Twitter is a microblogging platform along with a place where people can easily interact and share their thoughts in the form of tweets. Initially, it was invented with the thought of sending an SMS to a group of people. Now Twitter stands at the rank of 16th position in the category of most popular social networking sites globally.
Twitter was set to be acquired by Elon Musk, according to the news dated April 26, 2022. He had previously announced a deal worth $44 billion to acquire a majority of Twitter's stake and make it private. This had valued each share of Twitter at $54.20, at which Musk valued them. However, later, the deal, which was said to be on hold, had actually been pulled by Elon Musk, and the Twitter team was all set to sue him. Twitter actually sued Elon Musk, as per reports dated July 13, 2022, on Delaware's Court of Chancery. The social media giant reportedly accused Musk of "hypocrisy" in court on July 12, 2022. The judgement that was pending from the Court of Chancery was ruled in favour of Twitter, who was then asked to force the completion of the deal.
After an almost seven-month-long saga of various business and legal conflicts, finally, on October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter and appointed himself as the new CEO of the company.
The journey covered by Twitter from its start till now is commendable. This article highlights all essential aspects of Twitter such as its business model, revenue model, competitors, funding, and more in the form of the Twitter success story.
Twitter- Company Highlights
- Company Name- Twitter
- Founder - Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Noah Glass
- Founded - 2006
- Headquarters- San Francisco, California, United States
- Industry- Blogging Platform, Messaging, SMS, Social Media
- Revenue- $5.077 billion (2021)
- Total Funding- $12.9 billion (2022)
- Available In- Multilingual
- Areas Served- Worldwide
- Current CEO- Elon Musk
- Website- www.twitter.com
Twitter - About and How it Works?
Twitter is an America-based microblogging platform founded in the year 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass. Twitter has evolved as a social media platform cum microblogging platform giving out information on a range of topics.
People can easily interact with each other based on their interests and can also tweet on the platform to share their thoughts with a larger audience. Twitter was founded by a failed podcasts producing company named Odeo. Earlier it was termed as Twttr and then changed to the name, which is currently written as Twitter.
Twitter has more than twenty-five offices across the world. Tweets used to be originally restricted to 140 words, but in November 2017, the maximum for non-CJK languages was lifted to 280 words. Video and audio tweets are still limited to 140 secs over most profiles.
Both, as a sender and a receiver, Twitter is easy to use. You may easily join this platform with a free basic account and a Twitter handle or unique username. Then, on a daily, hourly, or as-needed basis, you may send out broadcasts, often known as "tweets."
In the "What's Happening" box beneath your profile picture, input 280 words or less, then click the Tweet button to post your tweet. Those who follow you and maybe those who do not will see your tweet if your account is public.
You can follow anyone, including celebrities and your favourite influencers, by selecting follow button on their profile to subscribe to their tweets on Twitter. You can simply unfollow them if their tweets aren't as entertaining as you thought. Visit Twitter.com at any time of day or night to see your Twitter feed, which is updated as people tweet. Look at what's trending to see what's going on around the globe. That's all there is to Twitter.
Twitter - Industry
Twitter belongs to the largest growing industry, the internet. The internet industry deals with the integration and linking of big data, analytical tools, and a wireless network. The industry is leading the way for a big change in the future due to more and more usage of internet-based platforms.
It provides a way for multiple activities to take place without the need for physical appearance. Some of the popular day-to-day activities seen by the internet industry are microblogging, social media, advertising, etc. The future of the Industry can be assumed as bigger, faster, and safer internet growth.
A social networking site is an online platform that allows users to develop social networks or connections with others who have similar professional or personal hobbies, interests, experiences, or legitimate connections. Social media is currently used by more than half of the world's population (58.4%).
Around the world, 4.62 billion individuals use social media, with 424 million new users joining in 2021. Every day, people spend an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes on social networking sites. The emergence of social media has been fueled by the human tendency to connect, as well as advances in digitalization. It's a story about large-scale personal friendships being formed and nurtured.
The market size of social media is growing exponentially with the estimated calculation for the US market size in 2022 to be $72.2 billion. Total growth of 15.6% is noted in the US for the social media market. As for the future, according to a report published by statista.com, over 4.41 billion users are expected to use social media by the year 2025.
Microblogging stands for the combination of instant messaging combined with content production. It differs from the natural blogging industry of the limited size of the content delivery. Microblogs include content with specific data ranges. They can be in the form of short videos, audio, or simple texts. The microblogging industry is not up to mark and is in a constantly evolving stage. It is emerging as one of the fastest-growing industries.
Twitter - Founders and Team
Twitter was not founded by a single person or by the efforts of one person. It took a whole group of four people to get together and launch a microblogging platform.
Jack Dorsey
- Jack Patrick Dorsey born on November 19, 1976, and a native of the United States was the former CEO of Twitter. He was born and brought up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he went to complete his schooling too. He started programming while being a student only due to his unavoidable interest in programming and computer communication.
- He completed his schooling at Bishop DuBourg High School. He was more than interested in the logistics and their working methods. At the age of 15, Jack Dorsey created a dispatch software that was still in use by many taxicab companies for a longer period.
- To get a degree, Jack Dorsey went to the University of Missouri. However, due to some unavoidable reason, he was transferred to the University of New York, which he dropped from six months of getting the hold of his degree.
- Jack Dorsey instead went to Oakland, California, and started a company offering dispatch software by the medium of the Internet in the year 2000. While working on the dispatch software, he came up with the idea of having a platform that combines instant messaging with his dispatch software for ease.
- With the same thought, Jack Dorsey approached the company named Odeo. After successful talks and some work, in 2006 Twitter was launched successfully with the first tweet done by Jack Dorsey stating "just setting up my Twitter.
- In the year 2010, Jack Dorsey co-founded a small business platform that accounts for debit and credit card payments on a mobile device named Square now changed to Block. Jack Dorsey serves as the CEO of Square. In 2021, the name Square was changed to Block to show interest in Blockchain. The former CEO also stepped down from the Twitter board on May 25, 2022. It was noted that Jack Dorsey had planned to leave the board when he chose to step down from the CEO position, however, the company mentioned in a statement that Dorsey would be staying on the board “until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders.”
Noah Glass
- The American Technology Entrepreneur Noah Glass is one of the co-founders of Twitter. He was the co-founder of a failed company called Odeo.
- Odeo was a podcasting company that failed after a few years of work and somehow gave rise to what we call today Twitter.
- Noah Glass was known to work on multiple projects before founding a podcast company. He was known to work at Industrial Light and Magic. He left work from there to join and co-work with Marc Canter.
- Marc Canter was the founder of Macromind. After that, Noah Glass developed an application named AudBlog which earned a partnership with Evan Williams. Together they created the podcasting company named Odeo.
- In 2006, while working on Odeo and its failing future, the basic idea for Twitter was invented.
- Noah Glass is highly acknowledged for giving the name "Twitter" to the newly developed platform with an abbreviated name "Twttr". Noah Glass is considered a forgotten Twitter co-founder who gave a few essential core features and ideas in the development of the platform.
Biz Stone - Co-founder of Twitter
- Co-founder of Twitter named Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone was born on March 10, 1974. Biz Stone completed his graduation from Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He then attended Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Boston but without getting a degree at both place.
- In the year 1999- 2001, Biz Stone was recorded to serve as a creative director at Xanga. For the year 2003-2005, Biz Stone was given the title of senior leadership at Google. In 2006, Biz Stone rolled out Twitter along with other co-founders and holds a patent to Twitter.
- In the year 2014, Biz Stone launched a new search engine named Jelly. Jelly was a search engine driven by factors of visual imagery and discovery. Stone served as CEO of Jelly till the time it was acquired by Pinterest. In 2017, Biz Stone showed intention to return to Twitter.
A few Awards and Recognition of Biz Stone would include:
- International Center for Journalists Innovation Award
- Listed as One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time
Evan Williams - Co-founder of Twitter
- The fourth Co-founder of Twitter Evan Williams was born on March 31 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska. He went to attend the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for just one and a half years and left with no degree. Evan Clark Williams went out to work at different technology jobs after leaving college. He went to places like Florida, Texas, etc before returning to his family farm.
- In 1996, Evan Williams went on to work at O'Reilly Media in a marketing position. Further, in the same firm, he got the promotion to work as an independent contractor writing computer code. This opportunity gave him the chance to work as a freelance coder and he took happily to work at different popular companies such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard.
- While working at O'Reilly Media, Evan Williams started his website to post his thoughts. In the year 1999, Evan Williams along with Meg Hourihan co-founded an initial blogging software named Pyra Labs. In 2005, Evan Williams along with Noah Glass went on to co-found a podcast company named Odeo. In 2006, Evan Williams along with other co-founders gave rise to social media platform named Twitter. In 2012, Evan Williams led to the launch of a publishing platform named Medium.
A few Awards and Recognition for Evan Williams are:
- In 2003, Evan Williams was given the recognition of MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators of the World under the age of 35.
- In 2004, he received the Recognition of "People of the Year" by PC Magazine.
- Twitter consists of 7000+ Tweeps (July 2022). Twitter employees are given the special tag "Tweep". Just the way messages posted on Twitter are called tweets, the person working for Twitter is termed a Tweep. The journey that Twitter is remarkable indeed. Looking back at the initial days, Twitter only had 8 employees back in January 2008.
Twitter - Startup Story
- Twitter is one of the successful platforms for now. However, the origin of Twitter lies in the ashes of another failed startup. The idea behind starting an instant messaging platform was taken from Jack Dorsey. And the name for the platform was given by Noah Glass.
- When Jack Dorsey was pursuing his bachelor's at NYU, he proposed the idea of a person using an SMS service to connect with a small group. The service's initial project code name was twttr, another variant of the term twitter, an idea credited to Noah Glass and inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS shortcodes. The choice was also affected by the fact that the URL twitter.com had been in use when twttr was launched, and it took the team 6 months to acquire the site and convert the company's name to Twitter.
- The year 2007 was a watershed moment for Twitter's evolution. During the episode, Twitter traffic increased from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets per day. Twitter began rolling out "New Twitter" in September and October 2010, a totally overhauled version of the site.
- The possibility to see videos and pictures without exiting Twitter by tapping on individual tweets that contain links to photographs and videos from a wide range of supported websites such as YouTube and Flickr, as well as a total revamp of the interface that moved links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages' and 'Log Out' became accessible via a black bar at the top of twitter.com.
Elon Musk - CEO of Twitter
- Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who is a prominent global entrepreneur, declared on April 4, 2022, that he had acquired 9.1% stakes in Twitter for $2.64 billion. As a consequence, Twitter's shares rose as high as 27%, marking the largest day rise since the firm's Offering in the year 2013.
- Elon was granted a seat on Twitter's management board committee as part of a contract that prohibited him from owning more than 14.9% stakes in the corporation, but he refused before his participation went into effect on April 9.
- On April 14, Musk made an unexpected bid to buy Twitter for $43 billion and make it private, claiming that he stood for the value of free expression for global democracy. On April 15, Twitter's board of directors approved a tactic that would enable shareholders to buy additional shares in the case of a truculent takeover, preventing Musk's invasion.
- On April 20, Musk got $46.5 billion in a deal offer to buy Twitter. On April 25, it was reported that Twitter was preparing to approve Musk's bid, and the board members officially authorized the deal, which became $44 bn shortly after on the same day.
- Musk has stated that his first goal in promoting openness is to open-source the system that promotes tweets in the content stream. He has indicated that he intends to eliminate spambots and verify all legitimate people. However, the deal was still on hold, as per May 2022 reports. Twitter had declared that it was facing recurring challenges with spam and fake accounts soon after Elon Musk thought it fit to acquire the platform. This is what Twitter is investigating currently, where it is checking whether the existing spam/fake accounts represent less than 5% of Twitter's users. On the other hand, Musk was still reported to be "committed to acquisition." As per the reports dated June 9th, 2022, Elon Musk has threatened the social media giant to blow up the deal over the bot issue. Soon after this, reports mentioned that a Twitter stakeholder wanted a judge to order the microblogging site to turn over internal papers that would prove the existing spam and fake accounts on Twitter. The Twitter acquisition deal of Elon Musk worth $44 bn had been unanimously approved by the Twitter board on June 21, 2022. However, along with it, there were uncertainties about whether that will happen because Twitter share prices have dipped far below Musk's offered price. Besides, Musk had also mentioned some unresolved issues concerning the debt and the spam and fake Twitter accounts, which he had doubted that they were not less than 5% of the monetisable daily active users.
- Elon Musk had then decided to abandon the Twitter acquisition, as mentioned in reports dated July 9, 2022. Twitter, in return, then mentioned that it will sue Musk and is determined to see the deal go through, by hook or by crook. Also, by the mutual agreement between the two parties, both Musk and Twitter agreed to impose a fine on either of the parties if they chose to back out from the deal. This stood valid, in case Musk decides finally to terminate the deal. He did back out from the deal, and eventually, Twitter sued him in the Court of Chancery, Delaware. The case was presided over by Kathaleen McCormick as the chief judge, who asked to complete the deal by force, thereby standing by Twitter. Now, the deal can either be completed or pushed further. The legal battle in this colossal acquisition deal is already at its climax!
- Twitter proposed that it would conduct a meeting of the shareholders on September 13, 2022, and would vote on the proposed $44 billion takeover of the social media company by billionaire Elon Musk. At this meeting, Twitter would also have shareholders vote on the approval of the compensation that Twitter would extend to some of its executive officers.
- On October 3, Musk's legal team informed Twitter that he was ready to complete his planned acquisition deal at the original price offer of $54.20 per share, a total cost of nearly $44 billion, reversing a months-long attempt to end the agreement.
- On October 27, Elon Musk finally closed the deal to acquire Twitter, becoming the new owner of the social media giant. Immediately after the takeover, he fired top executives of the company, including Parag Agrawal (CEO), Ned Segal (CFO), and Vijaya Gadde (legal affairs and policy chief).
- As a part of the many changes coming after the acquisition, Musk recently announced that Twitter will charge users $8 per month for a blue tick on Twitter. This decision has been criticised by many users, but Musk does not seem to have any plans to take it back.
Elon Musk Case Study : Success Story of The Richest Man
- Elon Musk founded PayPal and SpaceX and serves as the CEO of Tesla. Read the case study of Elon Musk to know his motivational story and the success journey.
Twitter - Mission and Vision
- Twitter's mission statement says, "The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation."
- Vision- "To be the world's most diverse and inclusive company".
Twitter - Name, Tagline, and Logo
- The initial meaning of the name Twitter means "a short burst of inconsequential information" or "chirps from birds".
- The initial thought for the name was "status". However, after going through the Dictionary, Jack Dorsey came across the name Twitter and instantly liked its definition. As he felt, the definition of the word is what they were doing. However, the domain under the name Twitter was not available for purchase and they have to go with its abbreviated version.
- After six months of launch, the domain name Twitter was purchased and the platform was renamed. The credit behind naming Twttr and Twitter goes to Noah Glass.
Tagline
- Discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world.
Twitter Logo
- The original name of the Twitter Bird is "Larry The Bird". The bird was named after the basketball player Larry Bird. Biz Stone can be said as the major reason behind selecting the logo for Twitter. He studied at a school outside Boston and hence had the same craze for basketball players who won three NBA championships for three years from 1981-to 1986. In the year 2012, the bird was given a haircut and started resembling a mountain bird.
- The current logo of Twitter consists of a blue-coloured bird on white background with no text attached to it.
Twitter - Business Model
- The business model of Twitter is a platform business model. A platform business model can be defined as a business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more two people and groups of people, especially in the case of consumers and producers. The majority of social media works on the same platform.
- Twitter has the same working pattern as other social media platforms. The user needs to register with a username and password for the use of Twitter. Unregistered users can also use Twitter but only to read tweets. Only registered users are allowed to tweet on its platform. A registered user can share text with 280 characters or a video of 140 seconds with a size ranging not more than 1 GB.
- Twitter allows its users multiple benefits such as the user can make their thoughts reach a global audience. The advertisement done on it can also reach a large audience. The data partners can easily search and navigate information from Twitter to create insights.
- Twitter currently generates revenue primarily through ad campaigns and data licensing. Twitter is continuing to expand its current income streams while also experimenting with new potential revenue streams from users and companies. The firm believes that its revenue channels may continue to develop at a quick pace, and it plans to double its revenues in 2022.
- Twitter's business model is created in a way that allows advantages to its users, advertisers, and data partners.
Twitter - Revenue Model
- The annual revenue of Twitter for FY2021 was noted to be $5.77 billion. There was a whopping increment of 36.63% in revenue from the year 2020.
- The Twitter revenue model helps the social media giant generate revenue in two ways -
- Data licensing accounts for around 14% of Twitter's income. In 2020, this will account for around $509 million, up from 9.2% in 2019. Subscriptions to public data are sold to organisations and developers under this income stream. The information gives both historic and current insights into user demographics and platform trends.
- The majority of Twitter's revenue comes from advertising. Advertising accounts for over 86% of the company's revenue. Promoted Ads, Follower Ads, and Trend Takeovers are examples of advertising. On the stream, all adverts are always labelled "Promoted." Advertisers buy Promoted Ads to get their product or service in front of a larger audience of Twitter users. Follower Ads propose new Twitter accounts for you to follow based on your interests, so you'll see Promoted Ads from people you follow. Trend Takeovers place advertisements next to trending issues to generate views based on what is most trendy and interesting on Twitter. The cost of Twitter advertisements varies. A sponsored tweet might cost somewhere between $0.50 and $2 for every action, while a promoted account can cost anywhere between $2 and $4 per new follower. Promoted trends may cost up to $200,000 per day if they are linked with the most popular subjects on Twitter.
Twitter - Funding and Investors
- If you've used Twitter for a long time, you must be well aware that not everybody has noble motives. Sadly, whether you're a regular citizen or a well-known personality, many users face a deluge of hate in their comments daily.
- Twitter has made efforts to combat abuse, to be sure. Users can, for example, filter the mention that they see. Furthermore, in 2021, Twitter launched "Safety Mode," which allows you to temporarily ban profiles that use abusive language or post inappropriate comments.
- Nonetheless, there is indeed a considerable distance to cover until harassment and bullying are no longer prevalent on the platform. Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter said that his main focus will be to combat this problem. On Twitter, misinformation spreads rapidly, and preventing this requires a collaborative effort from both the company and its users.
- Twitter is yet one of the most trendy and popular social media platforms in today's world. However, in recent years, it has experienced stiff competition from apps like TikTok. While it has initiated several advancements, it also needs to look beyond the box.
- The firm still has a sizable customer base and a valuable offering. However, Twitter's income increased by just 7% in 2020, to $3.7 billion. This amounted to $26 million in operational profit. COVID-19 undoubtedly contributed to Twitter's profits, but others may claim that the network has done very little development in an intensely challenging social media world.
- Twitter, ever since the social media platform has been founded, has witnessed its own share of challenges and mishaps. Twitter was down on Friday, February 11, 2022, due to a global outage. This was really a piece of big news, which prevented thousands of Twitter users from accessing their accounts.
- The Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barrack Obama, were hacked in a cryptocurrency scam. Late on Wednesday, July 15, 2020, there were irrelevant Tweets about cryptocurrency by Famous twitter personalities. This left some users baffled.
- It turned out that the Twitter accounts of these personalities were compromised. However, users soon realized that it wasn't just these accounts, but the Twitter accounts of Jeff Bezos, Kayne West, and many famous personalities were also compromised. While these types of scams are fairly common the question that arose was how these hackers gained access to high-profile Twitter accounts.
High-profile Personalities' Twitter Account Hacked
The list of accounts that were hacked are:
- Apple
- Binance
- Coinbase
- Coindesk
- Gemini
- Uber
Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO
- Nearly two hours after the hack, Twitter locked down and prevented at least some verified accounts from posting any tweets. After their first tweets were deleted the same bitcoin scam tweets were made again from the official accounts of Bill Gates, Obama, and high-profile personalities.
Twitter's Response to the Hack
- We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools, said Twitter support.
Twitter Layoffs
- While Twitter was upset about its shareholding pattern, hardly could anticipate its acquisition, and then nodded for the same, but was in trouble with its spam and fake accounts, the popular Twitter social media platform parted with 30% of its recruiting workforce, which was less than 100 employees, as far as reports go, dated July 7, 2022.
- Just a week after the company's takeover by Elon Musk, Twitter laid off 3,700 people, which accounts for nearly 50% of its workforce.
Twitter - Competitors
Twitter has several Competitors in the same industry but all with different features. Some of them are:
- Facebook is an American online social media and social networking Service owned by Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Facebook enjoys 2.85 million active users per month (31 March 2021).
- Pinterest is an image-sharing and social media service platform headquartered in San Francisco. It was invented in 2009 by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, and Ben Silbermann. Pinterest is an image discovery tool mainly consisting of pins and boards. Pinterest currently enjoys 431 million active users globally (February 2022).
Snapchat
- Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app. It was introduced by Snap Inc in the year 2011. Snapchat is more popular for its ability to share images and videos with the addition of filters. Snapchat enjoys active users of about 319 users per year (2021).
Twitter - Future Plans
- Twitter has more activity than any other social media platform right now. A few months ago, the microblogging site famed for its 280-character restriction attempted to relaunch itself with a slew of new features while maintaining its distinguishing qualities.
- Twitter has also shown social responsibility by installing powerful measures to keep fake news and hate speech out of its virtual debates, with even former US President Donald Trump being banned.
- Twitter is continually improving while also introducing new features like Spaces and Super Follows. When it comes to advertising, Twitter will be pushing performance marketing ahead in a big way. The company also wants to increase the number of technologies and marketing alternatives available to both major brands and small and medium enterprises.
- Twitter wants to double the number of its active users till the time of 2023. The Twitter team wants Twitter as a safe platform where people can easily share their thoughts without the worry of backlash or similar uncertainty. Twitter also plans to expand its marketing performance with better innovation and ad creation.
- Twitter plans to increase its daily users to 315 million users and the revenue to be at least $7.5 billion by the year 2023. Twitter plans to launch new features for more users to gain its attention.
- After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk is taking drastic actions for the company, like mass layoffs and implementing a charge for a blue-tick verification mark. Now, only time will tell what other future plans Musk has for Twitter.
FAQs
Who is the founder of Twitter?
- Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass.
Who is the CEO of Twitter?
- Elon Musk is the current CEO of Twitter.
When was Twitter founded or What year did Twitter start?
- Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006, in San Francisco, California, United States. However, it was launched on July 15, 2006.
Who is the owner of Twitter?
- Elon Musk is the new owner of Twitter. The company's acquisition by Musk was completed on October 27, 2022, in a deal worth $44 billion.
What is the Twitter revenue model?
All the revenue that Twitter earns is via 2 main channels:
- The sale of advertising services
- The sale of data licenses
How many people did Twitter lay off?
- Just a week after the company's takeover by Elon Musk, Twitter laid off 3,700 people, which accounts for nearly 50% of its workforce.