Twitter, which has been struggling on the growth front, recently came up with the idea of showing tweets to logged-out users. The “logged-out homepage” is the page users see when they visit Twitter.com while they are either not logged in or don’t have an account.
To turn logged-out visitors into Twitter users
Twitter last reported that it had 320 million active users, but it gets 500 million visitors every month. So this is a big opportunity. The micro-blogging firm redesigned the page for desktop visitors last year and now, a year later, it is rolling it out to mobile visitors in 23 countries.
“Today, we’re excited to announce improvements to twitter.com that will bring those great Tweets to even more people across the globe,” the micro-blogging firm said in a blog post.
Previously, when someone visited Twitter.com on a mobile browser, only the login screen used to come up. Now the new homepage shows a scrolling list of popular tweets from high-profile accounts. Also each tweet is labeled with a category: “cute animals,” “general news sources,” “pop artists,” and so on. As the visitor moves down the timeline, they are invited to sign up or log in.
Late, but impressive
The changes are impressive, but Casey Newton of The Verge questions how much opportunity the homepage really has to offer. Though it gives the micro-blogging firm one more place to put ads, since visitors do not have an account, the ads are less targeted, and this makes them less valuable as well.
“Then there’s the fact that the mobile web is in decline. And then there are the potential unintended consequences of the move — the better a logged-out experience you create for people, the less incentive they have to sign up for an account,” says Newton.
However, there is no good reason for the micro-blogging firm to not to try. What’s strange is that the company took almost a year to bring the changes to mobile after redesigning the desktop experience. But now it is finally here, and hopefully, after a quarter, we will get a sense of the number of new sign-ups it is able to generate.
On Tuesday, Twitter shares closed down 10.22% at $16.08. Year to date, the stock is down by over 30%, while in the last year, it is down by over 57%.
