You would think that in this politically charged environment, Twitter would be enjoying a surging stock price as engagement soars.
However, since the election of President Trump, Twitter’s stock has fallen 14 percent — despite the president’s 36 million followers and his more than 35,000 messages.
As a point of contention, an analyst came out to say last week that Twitter could lose 20 percent of its $11.8 billion market cap should the president stop tweeting.
For most public companies, when engagement increases, so does the stock price.
When Apple is preparing to release a new device, you see its shares rise.
And it does not have to be just good news.
Raytheon, which makes Tomahawk missiles, recently saw its stock move up as tensions mounted with North Korea. The logic is, increased demand is good for business.
Twitter does not yet have a clear, coherent strategy to capitalize on the demand for its service. It needs an economic mission statement.
Amazon lost money for years before making a buck. But it grew, and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos had a plan, solid execution and intellectual and engineering creativity.
At least Twitter has done one thing well: It now has 80 percent of its users on its mobile platform. But that success still needs to be converted into revenue.
With more than 300 million active monthly users, it’s time to start figuring things out.
This is Twitter’s moment, and it isn’t shining. Perhaps its board should finally consider clipping some wings, because its business model isn’t rewarding in any way.
Until Twitter can convert its hundreds of millions of users into significant ad revenue, those numbers are — as they say in Silicon Valley — just a vanity metric, or useless data that looks good but does not necessarily correlate to real success.