Twitter is worried you don’t know what Twitter is. Twitter wants to correct this issue and welcome you all into the warm embrace of Twitter. Twitter wants to convince you it can still be your best friend even if you don’t tweet. In a blog post today, the company announced 90 percent of people surveyed “globally recognize the Twitter brand” (good), but that not everyone in that percentage actually, you know, gets Twitter, which could translate to fewer active users (less good).
So here’s what Twitter wants you to know, by way of its new “See What’s Happening” campaign. The company is hoping a new series of ads will convince people that Twitter is a place “where you go to see what’s happening everywhere in the world right now.” (See also: a place were you go to find vicious and unbridled trolling.) As a general note, if you’re concerned people don’t understand your multibillion-dollar company, maybe you should do something about that before your ten-year anniversary.
More interesting than Twitter’s desire to convince people to see Twitter as a news source as well as a social platform, is the company’s concern that people don’t use Twitter because they think they have to tweet on the regular. According to Twitter, people surveyed “thought if they wanted to use Twitter, they were ‘supposed to Tweet every day’ and didn’t think they would have that much to say.” The subtext there, or subtweet as it were, being that you can absolutely still use Twitter without tweeting. (Of course, Twitter is likely hoping you’ll come around the whole engaging-completely-with-the-platform thing.) And as an added bonus, if you actually never tweet, then no one will ever tweet back at you with the beloved Twitter admonishment “Never Tweet.” Which is better for all of us.
