Twitter just can’t catch a break. The microblogging service which was once one of the hottest social media platforms on the Internet has been struggling with user retention for quite a while now. While still boasting over 300 million monthly active users, that number pales in comparison to the 1 billion unique visitors they receive each month. Why would a company with so may visitors struggle? Well, that’s why – they’re visitors, not users. Twitter is a social network that’s suffering from a relatively unique problem: it has a lot of visitors who don’t want to use it and a lot of users who don’t want to be sociable. Not surprisingly, that situation doesn’t bode well with the advertisers who are the bread and butter of every social network. When you have unhappy advertisers, you usually earn less advertising money and that’s basically what’s currently happening – Twitter is performing below expectations in terms of revenue. The social network’s users aren’t active enough and Twitter can’t compensate for that with rapid growth because it simply isn’t growing rapidly anymore.
Following that train of thought, when you’re a publicly traded company whose advertisers would rather invest in your competitors, your shareholders aren’t happy. Naturally, you want to keep your shareholders happy so you introduce some changes or new features and hope they’ll make things better. That’s exactly what Twitter has been doing for years but few of the features it experimented with or fully integrated have resonated with users. At the moment, this strategy hasn’t amounted to much save for an identity crisis. So, the problem still isn’t solved, shareholders are still unhappy, and they’re advocating for a sale in hopes that someone else can solve the company’s issues. Twitter’s board wasn’t exactly thrilled with that idea but reluctantly agreed to go through with it anyway.
However, Twitter just can’t catch a break. Despite the likes of Google, Disney, and Apple being interested in acquiring the microblogging platform, all of the suitors dropped the idea of an acquisition for one reason or another. Twitter’s last realistic hope was the cloud software company Salesforce but that option was now ruled out as well. In an interview with Financial Times, the CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff stated that the Californian firm gave up the idea of acquiring Twitter because it “wasn’t the right fit” for them. So, as things stand right now, Twitter is still on its own and probably will be for the foreseeable future.