Five lessons Elon Musk should have learned from failed social media sites
Twitter isn’t the first social media site to steer off course. But it’s the first to do absolutely everything wrong — from a change of direction to a botched rebranding.
In 2010, when Twitter was four years old, I was commissioned to write a piece about the potential longevity of the site by TechRadar. Though some of my sources disagreed, I hedged my bets and said that it could become a household name, like Google or Amazon. And it did!
In the second part — linked here — was a list of five lessons Twitter could learn from social media sites that had failed.
This is the tl;dr version:
1. Be free at the point of access. (A subscription model killed Friends Reunited)
2. Don’t spam your users. (Friendster became so saturated with ads it was unusable)
3. Focus on your unique selling point. (MySpace morphed from a social network to a music recommendation engine and died)
4. Being first is not enough. (ICQ had 100 million users at its height in 1996, but who remembers it now?)
5. Capitalise on your name while it’s known. (Netscape was the web’s best-known brand until the web’s 2nd best-known brand, AOL bought it out and mothballed it. Now…
