What Twitter can learn from that time Coca-Cola changed its formula
Changing your well-known formula is a big risk for any business, something Coca-Cola remembers all too well. Twitter would do well to learn from the drinks brand’s mistakes, writes University of South Australia’s Collette Snowden in this crossposting from The Conversation.
The 140-character message limit has defined Twitter. But the company is now experimenting with its format, doubling the length of some users’ tweets to 280 characters. Why are they taking such an enormous risk, playing with the characteristic that defines and differentiates the service?
The reason is that Twitter’s user base has been stuck at about 320 million for some time. If this doesn’t change, entropy will set in and Twitter could collapse.
We can learn a lot about what Twitter is going through by looking at the time Coca-Cola decided to change its recipe, and unveiled “New Coke”. The change was rejected by customers, and the company had to backtrack.
Another thing pushing Twitter’s move is that it reported a slight decline in users and a loss of US$116 million in the most recent quarter. It was punished by investors and put on notice, so increasing users and ad revenue are important corporate objectives.
A big leap forward was removing links/photos and at @tags from the character count. They should be looking at this for promoted tweets, not more text. Look at Medium – a great idea in theory but uptake was minimal.
a real geek move would have been to raise it to 141, or drop it to 139.