Re-engaging Repeat Churners with Events and Accounts
Hundreds of millions of users who return to Twitter each month are repeat-churners. Each time they visit, they spend a few days to a week, then disappear for a month or more. Over a few months, I refined our understanding of these users and proposed several exploratory solutions for how we might serve them.
Summary of Insights
We learned a couple things:
Many repeat churners don’t follow or like posts.
Repeat churners come back for events and specific accounts.
Problem
If users aren’t interacting with posts by liking or commenting, and they don’t follow accounts, it’s difficult to recommend content, so they have no reason to keep coming back consistently.
Opportunity
Since we see users returning for events and specific accounts, we can infer that they care about these things. We need to tailor the experience of repeat churners to emphasize related content.
Insights Deep Dive
Finding 1: Returning users are less-engaged than new users
Compared to new users, they have a low rate of following accounts and liking Tweets. Because of their infrequent visits and transactional, consumption-oriented experience on the platform, I started to call them “Twitter Tourists.”
Returning users like Tweets at a lower rate than new users.
Returning users follow accounts at a lower rate than new users.
Finding Two: Users return for events and accounts.
The common understanding of repeat visits was that they return for breaking news events and cultural moments. So I asked our data scientist to confirm this with a query of where people visit when they return. What this data showed is that our repeat users visit several different kind of pages. This suggested that they weren’t just coming to Twitter for events.
Events Pages
These visits can be explained by users visiting Twitter for breaking news events and cultural moments. For example, if you come to Twitter to find Tweets about an event, you would go to the explore page to see if it shows up in the top stories of the day. If the event isn’t trending, you can use this same page to search.
Profile Page
The Profile Page visits reflected a pattern that we previously heard about in qualitative research. A user is interested in a celebrity or popular user, so occasionally they’ll return to Twitter to hear what the user has to say before leaving.
Yet at the same time, they don’t follow this account because they don’t want this follow to be public. For example, maybe someone is a secret kpop stan. Sometimes they’re interested in hearing what a controversial person is saying, but they don’t want to signal support. Anecdotally, we’ve even heard of users opening the app daily to check in on accounts.
Solutions
Now that we had a clearer picture of who these users are and why they return to Twitter, I started sketching out some solutions for each problem.
Better Search
User Group: Users who return to Twitter for events.
Problem: After a failed Twitter search, users try a different query or quit altogether.
Solution: Search that provides more suggestions and prevents users from reaching dead ends.
Richer search experience allows users to more easily refine their search
Search Suggestions
Event Updates
User Group: Users who return to Twitter for events.
Problem: Conversations continue even after the user ends a session, and they miss out on updates.
Solution: If a user engages with a trend searches for a term, update them when there has been more conversation related to that trend or search term. These updates can be sent via notification or email.
Follow-up notifications
Newsletter
Help Users Manage their Privacy
User Group: Users who return to Twitter for Tweets from specific accounts.
Problem: Users sometimes want their follows to be private.
Protected Account Prompt: Currently users can make their follows and Tweets private by creating a “Protected Account. If we send this prompt to users when they repeatedly visit an account, perhaps they’ll adopt this new privacy control.
Quiet Follow: Quiet follows allow users to follow an account without other accounts being able to see that follow.
Account Updates
User Group: Users Who Return to Twitter for Specific Accounts
Problem: If a user doesn’t follow an account, they miss out on updates.
Infer Interest by Visits: Infer interest without a follow and provide updates via notifications or email.
User Education about Private Accounts
Quiet Follow
Updates via notification
Updates in a newsletter
Impact
This presentation generated interest in the team in learning more about these two segments of users. In particular, the segment of users who visit profiles had previously not been studied, so follow-up research looked into the needs of this group.