After falling behind in the recent quarter and being "shamed" by media and its own investors because of slow user growth, Twitter unleashes the "big guns" and reveals its plans next year.
Twitter has had quite a bad rap among media and investors since its shares dramatically went down 35 percent this year, along with high management turnover and slow user growth.
Investors have somehow lost confidence with the social media behemoth, as it lags behind Facebook's 1.3 billion monthly active users with its meagre 284 million users-doubting if Twitter is more of a "niche product."
In order to win over its investors, Twitter revealed its strategic plans for next year, and asked its weary investors to focus on the brighter side of things: 500 million looged-out visitors it attracts every month.
Twitter plans to make it easier for new users to use the site, making it easier to sign up. Through an upcoming feature called "Instant Timeline," for example, first-time tweeters will be able to choose from categories like sports, television and technology to be automatically shown a feed of interesting tweets and users.
Twitter will also better educate new users on the site's quirky and complicated jargons to be more user-friendly.
Aside from that, the company also plans to pull in existing users more often with the "Timeline Highlights" that will display popular tweets and show it live on Twitter's traditional chronological order of tweets.
Users will be able to send public tweets to other users in direct messages to discuss privately. Twitter will soon allow users to shoot and upload videos from directly within the Twitter app.
The social media giant is also rolling out a new standalone app to the microvideo sharing service Vine.
Lastly, Twitter plans to make its top 50,000 hashtags every day to be indexed in search engines, making its users more eager to tweet and use hashtags.
