5 product roadmap ideas for the next Twitter CEO

There is just 1 hour left in Elon Musk’s poll to decide his fate as the leader of Twitter. While I really don’t expect this to result in an immediate change, but rather the start of a more formal transition plan, I think it’s important to consider how Twitter can be a better platform.

Twitter has its challenges, but the fundamentals are strong and a strong product roadmap should excite existing users for what’s to come and have the potential to grow the user base. If Twitter is successful in that mission over the coming 1-2 years, more users, mean more advertiser interest, but the finances between here and there have to also make sense.

Product idea #1 – Sponsored Twitter Spaces

I was someone who really enjoyed Clubhouse, but there’s no doubt the reach and size of the audience on Twitter Spaces leave Clubhouse for dead. While there are not many places where being verified is an advantage, this is certainly one of them, providing confidence to the hosts that bringing up an account with a checkmark is going to be a verified human looking to contribute value to the conversation.

The size of audiences on Twitter Spaces is at a level where they could attract advertisers and right now there’s no formal support from the platform to offer hosts the ability to hold Sponsored Spaces.

Twitter has a revenue opportunity here. Give hosts the ability to nominate a ‘Sponsored by’ company, showcase a featured link of choice at the top of the space and offer a revenue split with the hosts. The default could be a 70/30 split, 70% to the hosts, 30% to Twitter, just like the AppStore.

The hosts would have to nominate the amount of payment provided off platform, or in the event, things are organised, Twitter could provide an end-to-end option for payment on Twitter. The advertiser could also benefit from having recordings of the sponsored Twitter Space, made available to them through an admin portal that allows for easy cutting up of clips from the Space to share as content. Given Spaces is audio-only, there really needs to be some visual templates that help build a visual element to the content.

If Twitter wants to really get creative, this video that gets created by the Spaces Clips, could be created in multiple aspect ratios like 16:9 for sharing to YouTube or Facebook, or 16:9 for sharing on TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, all with a TwitterSpaces watermark to help drive users to the platform.

Product idea #2 – Creator fund++

Other platforms offer creators of content a revenue share. This is true of YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and others, yet Twitter currently is a platform that can drive serious traffic off the platform to make money there, but real engagement needs to happen on Twitter itself.

Right now, the best advertising option Twitter has is really sponsored tweets that are associated to a hot #hashtag, but moving to native, longer-form content opens the door to many more possibilities.

In the case of video, you have the option for pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll video ads when the video content is longer-form. Again if these video ad buys happen on the platform, Twitter can derive revenue from these ads directly. Given Twitter will be late to this game, they need to offer something above and beyond what’s possible elsewhere.

An ability to showcase live Tweets next to content is one option that goes above and beyond the typical comment threads and could include animated GIFs, threaded conversations that react to specific parts of the video, and more.

Twitter is a great micro-blogging platform, but they’re really leaving a massive opportunity on the table. Many of us use WordPress to write longer articles and product reviews. If Twitter wanted to grow up, to a full blogging service, then offer users the ability to get a referral income (again in a revenue share model with Twitter), this could be their equivalent to Amazon’s referral.

Given Elon’s experience with free supercharging referrals, I’m sure he understands just how powerful this could be, the question is, has he considered a full end-to-end 3rd-party referral program?

Brands and advertisers have products and services they want to promote. Twitter users and Influencers love early access to products and payment where they can refer their audience to products they believe in. Average Twitter users are always looking for product reviews and recommendations, particularly at peak times like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Easter and there’s even an ability to link in friend graphs and leverage upcoming birthdays as a buying opportunity.

This solution would need to include not only the ‘buy now button, but also handle various payment options, much as we see in a Shopify Store. Given Musk’s background in payments, combined with his love for Crypto, I’m sure there are many options available here, while Twitter takes a ‘platform fee’ for such transactions.

If Twitter could bring these audiences and motivations together to be mutually beneficial, it could be a seriously big addition to the platform, both in the functionality offered and potential reasons to keep coming back to Twitter over other social networks.

With other platforms offering revenue shares, I think Twitter has to get aggressive and offer something like a 90/10 split with creators to draw them away from other platforms and have a terms of service that requires content to be unique.

Product idea #3 – Business users

If you’re a brand, managing multiple accounts, or need multiple people to help with that account, Twitter could create business tools, similar to, hopefully, better than what Facebook offers.

Where it makes sense, automation tools and integrations with 3rd party tools like IFTTT or Zapier would be possible, but only for a monthly price. As individuals, the Twitter Blue payment is difficult to reach a high percentage of users who have always paid zero dollars for social media, but for brands that derive clear value from social networks, expecting payment, where features and functionality justify it, is not unreasonable.

Product idea #4 – 3rd party API access

As much as I personally don’t love the idea, if I was running Twitter and looking at where a large volume of our costs come from, it would be invited to review the 3rd party API access. If you’re a developer that makes a Twitter app, then Twitter could ask you to pay a fee to access the API.

We know Twitter has a program to access what is affectionately known as ‘the firehose’, but this is only available to those with larger budgets and needs to get all the tweets from the platform.

What I’m suggesting here is that if a Twitter app wants to access the Twitter API, it must be providing value to its users and therefore should be able to charge at least a few dollars to thousands of users. If they are profiting from the API calls, charging them a monthly or annual fee for API access could increase revenue for Twitter.

If 1,000 developers were charged $1,000 per year for API access, that’s an additional million dollars for the company. While that certainly won’t fix Twitter’s revenue challenges, the suggestions above do have an unlimited potential to do that.

Product idea #5 – TV apps

Twitter is the place where many of us turn to for breaking news, effectively a replacement for what we used to use our TV for. Now the traditional news cycles have been interrupted, it’s strange there isn’t a way to consume Twitter on the largest screen in your house.

As Twitter moves further into video and particularly live video, it’s possible that Spaces migrate from simply being audio-only, to also including video, effectively creating a Microsoft Teams or Zoom competitor. With a global reach, this could be an incredibly efficient way to distribute information and the interface should support personalization of favourite topics, people, or news and entertainment providers.

Twitter is great on a mobile phone, TweetDeck is amazing on a desktop, and Twitter TV should be the next big platform Twitter moves to (before VR at some time in 2030).

The Poll.

More than 16 million people have voted for Musk’s pole. At the time of writing, the result was 57.5% for yes (Elon should step down) and 42.5% for no (Elon should stay).

If you have other suggestions for Twitter’s future roadmap, leave a comment below.