With Twitter struggling for growth and focus, what better person to ask for advice than the head honcho of a rival social network that’s emerged as one of the world’s most valuable companies in the world?
While Jack Dorsey won’t be calling Mark Zuckerberg any time soon, during a town hall Q&A in Berlin this afternoon, an audience member took up the task on behalf of Dorsey and asked Zuck: “Considering the current state of Twitter, if you were its CEO, what would you do right now?”
It was the biggest sign yet that the questions at these Q&A events aren’t filtered and vetted in advance. And it was a question that caused more than a few awkward and nervous laughs from the Facebook CEO, however, needless to say it garnered a series of whoops and cheers from the crowd.
“There is no right way for me to answer this question… um… ummm… let me say… I’ve no idea what to say to that,” spluttered Zuckerberg.
Above: Zuck Q&A
Zuck didn’t answer the question head-on… however, he did a good job of steering the question back towards Facebook, while still kinda sorta answering the question at hand. He said:
“Let me answer that question by talking about what we’ve done with Instagram. Facebook traditionally has been a service that is mostly focused on more private communication, with friends, small groups. One of the things I think other networks — such as Twitter or YouTube — have traditionally done more on is on public content.
Recently with Instagram, and Facebook as well, we’ve realized that that’s an area (public content) in the community we’re building. People want to keep in touch with the athletes that they care about, the celebrities, the actors, the political and civil leaders. Giving people tools to be able to share who they care about, and follow those things, I think it's contributed to a large degree in the growth of Instagram. And I think it's historically to the growth of Twitter too.
However, it’s certainly an area we’re seeing with Instagram, people follow the public figures that they care about. Instagram joined us when that community was 20 million people. And the team that worked on Instagram at the time was 14 people. At the time everyone was like ‘You bought that for a billion dollars, you’re crazy’. Since then, we’ve helped to build the team up, ten times bigger now — 150 of the best people at Facebook are working on Instagram, and the community has grown from 20 million people to more than 400m people. It’s bigger than Twitter.
I think tons of that is because we’ve executed the roadmap that I’m talking about in terms of giving people — public figures — the ability to produce great raw content of what’s going on in their lives and giving people the ability to connect with that.”
Zuck’s initial tactic was to draw a dividing line between his company and Twitter by noting that they have traditionally been two different things. However, with the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram nearly four years ago, and also with more recent moves that Facebook itself has been making, some parallels can be drawn between Facebook and Twitter.
To conclude his answer, Zuckerberg pointed to the new Facebook live video-streaming feature as another way that his company is looking to connect people on a public forum.
“‘Live’ is going to be an awesome thing for public figures… imagine your favorite public figure or politician having the power to broadcast from their pocket, go live, have an audience of thousands of people. There’s tons more that needs to be done to give people the ability to connect with the people and figures they’re interested in. I think you’re going to see tons of that on Instagram and Facebook, and if the Twitter folks do a good job, I think you’ll see tons more of that on Twitter too.”
So it’s probably not the answer people were looking for, however, reading between the lines of Zuck’s response, it sounds like he’s saying that Twitter needs to do a better job of connecting its millions of users with the public figures they choose to follow.
Certainly, Twitter is making some moves in that direction through integrating its live video-streaming service Periscope into the core Twitter app, however, Twitter’s problem extends beyond that — which is why it will soon launch a tool that will expand tweets beyond 140 characters. Despite opposition to that move, maybe removing Twitter’s core defining feature will ultimately make it easier for public figures to communicate with their followers.