Twitter’s newly-appointed chief executive Jack Dorsey proposed three key focuses for the troubled social network during its disappointing Q3 earnings presentation: more disciplined execution, simplified services and better communication of the brand’s value.
With regards to execution, Dorsey said the company had simplified its roadmap around a few big blips, by assigning leads for each major project and fully staffed teams. However, in order to achieve this objective, the workforce was reduced by about 8%.
“This decision was difficult, but we strongly believe we can move faster with this new work structure and smaller, nimbler teams,” Dorsey said.
“Product engineering and design still represent our largest group and that’s important because, as a technology company, our services power everything we do and we’re still hiring and investing in talent in ways that specifically serve our priorities.”
Dorsey went on to say that Adam Bain had taken on a broader role as chief operation officer and Omid Kordestani has joined as executive chairman. “Omid’s experience helping world class teams grow and operate at scale is a tremendous asset for our board, our leadership and our company,” he added.
“Twitter is getting easier to use with a steady increase of launches,” Dorsey said, discussing improvement including Highlights, which pushes the most interesting tweets of the day tailored to the reader, as well as new tools to help developers find, organise and syndicate tweets in mobile apps and websites.
Other features he discussed included landscape view for Periscope, music on Vine and Moments, which focuses on “the best of what’s happening on Twitter in an instant”, from Washington Post’s fashion week moment to Mashable’s moment of the South Carolina flood.
According to Dorsey, the focus now with Moments is making them easier to discover and rolling the feature out globally beyond the US.
Looking at the better communication aim, Dorsey said “I’m happy with the strides we are making here as well”.
“We began integrating a marketing campaign in the United States around Moments that will roll out over the rest of the year and into 2016,” he added, mentioning TV ads that were shown on 27 October during the World Series broadcast in the US.
He also said the company was doing a better job at leveraging events that show Twitter’s value to customers, as well as reaffirming support of the developer community and improving tools. He also says the company has asked general counsel Vijaya Gade to take responsibility for the communications team.
“She’s pushing us to tell great stories to the press and also use our own communications services more creatively and more proactively.”
Bain summarised that the three main initiatives for ads were building a rich canvas for marketers through the growth of video and promoted Moments, driving marketer ROI with improved measurement fitting and relevance through investment and increasing scale by leveraging Twitter’s unique total audience.
