Laying the foundation for Twitter for Business
With over 200 million users Twitter is considered to be one of the largest social surfaces based in the United States. However, the company has historically prioritized growing their business specifically around the needs of campaign strategies for global brands (think the Apple, Google, Nikes of the world).
Small and medium-sized businesses were relatively untapped, with an unknown quantity across the product, they served as an opportunity to grow the company’s business. As a founding designer on Emerging Businesses, our focus was on scaling a new product surface that could provide tools and features unique to SMBs that would enable them to increase their digital presence while supporting consumers in the discovery of new brands, goods, and services.
I focused on leading initiatives to better understand the needs of SMBs and delivering net new design experiences that could drive revenue for the business, and steadily increase the engagement of consumers on Twitter.
Understanding Businesses’ Goals & Motivation For Social Surfaces
With SMBs being a relatively untapped surface across the business, I worked in partnership with product researchers to better understand what we currently did understand about businesses on Twitter . While we didn’t have research from the last 5 years, the research team delivered a summary of insights that focused on what Twitter currently understood about the goals, motivations, and needs of businesses on Twitter today.
What we learned was that businesses use Twitter similar to almost any other digital surface today — research outlined the following:
Business Motivations
What was it that businesses hoped to gain by using Twitter, what was their perspective of social surfaces generally, and what were the most valuable surfaces for their goals?
Business Goals
Developing an understanding of how businesses were using social surfaces to reach the goals of the actual business?
Consumer Goals
- What were the goals of consumers across the product, what were their ideal interactions with businesses specifically on Twitter?
With these insights, I understood that the foundation of the design would need to incorporate design solutions that would enable businesses and consumers to connect in meaningful ways.
Benchmarking Competitive Experiences To Understand How Twitter Measured Up
By reviewing competitors and comparing the way that the same company appeared across different surfaces like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter I developed a clear understanding of the breadth of competitor’s product capabilities.
It was clear that Twitter was behind its competition and redesigning business profiles would offer us an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves to SMB with new functionality.
This surface would also introduce a new business opportunity to drive revenue in the form of smaller advertisers, a previously untapped part of the business and a market that competitors consistently depended to meet revenue goals in their organizations.
Developing a Strategic POV Based on How Businesses Were Currently Hacking The Product
The most compelling design exercise in shaping my POV was reviewing how businesses were currently hacking Twitter profiles. In the absence of having a dedicated surface for businesses to advertise, promote, or share their products — SMBs and global organizations had leveraged different features & interactions on their profiles to tell a more meaningful story.
Some of the top hacked surfaces included:
Bios - Often leveraged by SMBs and specifically brick and mortar stores to share their location or general business information or direct consumers to their website for larger more global companies the bio would leverage this surface area as a way to communicate how to get in touch with customer service
Pinned Tweets - Often leveraged by digital brands, media outlets, sports teams, and podcast to share upcoming events, pin new products, or upcoming episodes
Threaded Tweets - Often leveraged by celebrities and influencers, to announce or launch something new
Developing A Design Solution That Accounts For Technical Feasibility
A design solution can be beautiful and intuitive, but if it lacks the ability to be implemented it will never see the light of day. Through early partnership with engineering leadership, I worked to understand what it was we could change on the Profile without disruption to the entire surface area.
While we were a new team and establishing a new surface area, we had inherited severe technical debt on profiles as a surface area. While a user’s profile is a high visibility consumer experience, for our team it would require a significant technical overhaul to implement new changes to it.
By partnering with engineering early, we identified a series of constraints that we could both design and build against.
We determined 4 key ideal states for the profile:
Dream State - If we had the ability to introduce a new tab to the profile system (below the header) how would this appear and look to consumers?
V0 - What if only one essential thing in the profile would be changed, if a business badge was introduced, how would it look for businesses?
V1 - If we introduced modularity, what would those modules appear as, how would they be visible to consumers and edited by businesses?
V2 - What would a maximum state look like, including a business badge and multiple modules to occupy the real estate? Could those modules have bespoke interactions for consumers and businesses?
From Design Vision To Fully Staffed - Delivering A Design Through Executive Review
After creating a series of robust explorations that were aligned to our technical constraints, I flew to San Francisco to deliver these design solutions alongside my partner, our VP of Product. After leading the team through several rounds of executive reviews, including leveraging design as a tool to achieve buy-in from Chief Executives across the entire company — we were given an approved budget to build out a complete engineering team consisting of data science, infrastructure, and front-end engineers.
The hiring pipeline meant that we were roughly a year out from delivering the solution, and meant that we would need to strengthen our roadmap to be inclusive of both organic business interactions and paid advertising (the engine behind Twitter). This meant we needed to create a durable roadmap for Twitter for Professionals to be successful.
This led to delivering a new vision for self-serve advertisers with Quick Promote on Twitter. A self-serve advertising product that when re-imagined would open up a total addressable market of ~$73B and would allow small and medium-sized businesses to run their own advertisements quickly and easily.
