Despite Donald Trump proving he could overwhelm Silicon Valley’s “Thought Police” on Twitter, the platform’s political correctness means that the Twitter brand is still not attractive to the conservative half of America.
President-elect Trump, with more than 16 million followers, has continued to use Twitter as a flame-thrower to attack liberal critics, toot his own horn and continue to dominate the news cycles.
All of this should be manna from heaven for the once-number-three social media company, which has fallen to 9th place in the last 17 months. But even with Trump and the election pumping up Twitter, the company in October posted a $106 million GAAP loss, and recently dumped another 9 percent of its employees.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Business Insider, “Our strategy is directly driving growth in audience and engagement, with acceleration in year-over-year growth for daily active usage, tweet impressions, and time spent for the second consecutive quarter.”
He added: “We see a significant opportunity to increase growth as we continue to improve the core service. We have a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth. The key drivers of future revenue growth are trending positive, and we remain confident in Twitter’s future.”
But Breitbart News reported in October that Piper Jeffray’s newest “Teen Survey” found that Snapchat garnered what Madison Avenue brand specialists refer to as the “Iron Throne” — a teen’s top preference — with 35 percent of the vote. That was followed by Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) Instagram division, which held a 24 percent preference with teens. The survey found virtually no interest in the Twitter brand among the youth demographic that advertisers most want to engage.
All this grim news happened while Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was helping Trump use Twitter as the centerpiece of the Republican presidential nominee’s insurgent election victory.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who helped design the Clinton campaign’s technology system stated, “Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election … Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”
Breitbart News reported that Gary Coby, Director of Digital Advertising and Fundraising for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, claims that Jack Dorsey allegedly became involved twice to nix Donald Trump from spending $5 million for Twitter’s paid advertising to attack Hillary Clinton under #CrookedHillary.
Unable to give Twitter money, Jared Kushner and the Trump digital army used massive numbers of free tweets to help Trump score a huge polling uptick after each of the debates with Hillary Clinton.
Despite Donald Trump generating an estimated $5 billion in free “earned media” over the 18 months of the campaign, Twitter apparently never saw a dime of revenue from his efforts.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.