Will Twitter’s Lists feature restart its growth?

Twitter will soon be releasing its Lists feature.  Twitter’s growth rate has recently slowed down.  According to Hitwise, its phenomenal growth rate slowed to .17%. In part, this appears to be due to an inability to retain new users (60% leaving in the first month of use, by some reports). 

Lists represent an opportunity for Twitter to reignite its growth. Lists can help Twitter grow by providing three important improvements:

• A better UI that makes the stream easier for users to digest.
• A positive first experience for new users, where they immediately see the value of Twitter
• A way to spread the word to more non-users and broadly entice them, through List links on blogs, business sites, and through sharing.

Better UI

This is the obvious one. Part of the reason Twitter is implementing lists is to match the functionality of clients like Tweetdeck that allow you to group users and view their tweets in separate windows or panels. This makes the large volume of tweets much more manageable. It allows people to view tweet content by topic or relationship to the twitterers.

Improving the user experience is important. Twitter knows this, which is why they’ve recently hired someone from Digg to build a user research team. My own usability study showed that Twitter’s UI model is a challenge to many users.

Lists is probably only the first of several steps Twitter will take to make the user experience better. As the UI improves, it should help reduce the drop-off rate of new users.

Positive First Experience

 My study revealed that one of the reasons that new users often respond poorly to Twitter is that they don’t see how it can be valuable to them. They have trouble knowing who to follow. They may have a goal in mind when they join Twitter, but unless they are following the right people and seeing useful tweets right away, they don’t understand how Twitter can help them.

Lists will help address this problem, IF Twitter puts up a directory of their own, as part of the Join process. I’m sure they are planning this. Most likely, they’ll replace the much-maligned SUL with a directory, organized by topic. New users will pick a topic or two that interests them. Upon completing the join process, they’ll be likely to immediately see tweets of interest to them. That gives them a reason to explore and come back to Twitter.

Getting 3rd Parties to Spread the Word

This is the piece that offers the best opportunity to spur Twitter growth.  Lists are sure to be a hit with the people already using Twitter. But it’s the broader set of internet users who need to hear about and use Lists, in order to spur growth.

Twitter has aided the process by structuring Lists so that you can easily paste the URL for a list on your website, put it in a newsletter, or share it in other ways. That’s how we designed TweetPackages. You received a URL that you could put on your site so users could click it to mass follow you and your recommendations.

This allows bloggers and businesses to create their own lists, of interest to their audiences. I haven’t seen exactly how Twitter has implemented Lists, so I don’t know if they provided an incentive for people to share their Lists outside of Twitter. I hope so, because that will give people a reason to put links to lists on their sites.

For TweetPackages, the incentive was that anyone who used your list also automatically followed you. That meant that putting a TweetPackage on your site was a way to gain followers–and not just random followers, but followers who actually were relevant to you. 

Hopefully Twitter’s Lists also somehow automatically gives the List creator visibility or an auto-follow. The goal is for blogs and businesses to create lists and put them on their sites. They will come up with lists that serve a wide variety of niche interests. They’ll put them on their sites, which are dedicated to those niche interests. Users or readers try the lists, see tweets about the topic they care about, and are far, far more inclined to check Twitter out again.

When Lists appear, we’ll see if Twitter has positioned Lists a growth mechanism: adding a List directory as part of the Join process and, preferably, offering a benefit to List creators who share their lists. 

Having the wider blogger, business, and even social networking communities sharing and distributing Lists centered around specific topics

                       plus a positive first experience with obvious value

                                         and an overall better UI… 

Twitter’s got a winner.

(By the way, in my next blog post, I’ll give you some ideas about how you can best use Lists to grow your business or blog audience.)