Twitter is about passion - not friends

Thirteen years later it has more than 300 million active users worldwide, including American President Donald Trump, singer Justin Bieber and footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.

Even The Royal Family has a Twitter account, boasting more than 30,000 Tweets and nearly four million followers.

Rulebook

Twitter has rewritten the rulebook for how politicians, celebrities and businessmen communicate.

For many it has become their first port of call to find out about Brexit, general elections and terrorist attacks.

"When Twitter first started people would tweet what they were having for breakfast," says Birmingham-born Bruce Daisley, the European vice-president for the social media giant.

"These days you are more likely use it to follow what's happening in the news about your football team or you might not have been able to get enough about Brexit. But Twitter now is a newsfeed more than anything else.

"We've always seen Twitter as Darwinian and survival of the fittest, but if you have five followers and tweet something funny you will race to the top.

"People are using Twitter more to have conversations now. We have also seen the emergence of high quality contributors like JK Rowling and Gary Lineker – the big iconic names. We are seeing the significance of these people rise because others are having conversations about their stuff."

Problems

As Twitter has become more central to the lives of its users worldwide, so the problems with disruptive users have grown.

There are now more than 500 million tweets sent every day. Once its prime problem was spammers trying to push porn or gadgets, now one of Twittter's biggest problems is trolls – people who use their accounts to write abusive messages targeting individuals.

Mr Daisley admits a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to clamp down on the behaviour, including deleting fake and offensive accounts.

He says: "It's the biggest team at Twitter. It's a battle you can never fully win and are always trying to second guess what's happening.

"We have made such incredible progress over the last 12 months. In 2018 we banned 10 times more accounts per day than we did in 2017.

"But you are never revealing a banner saying, 'mission accomplished'."

Conversational

So what next for Twitter? "We are trying to make it more conversational," Mr Daisley says.

"Twitter is a great place to go and talk about the things you are passionate about. Facebook might be the place people go to connect with friends. Twitter is not necessarily about friends, it's about passions. You might be a fan of cricket or I'm A Celeb, people go to talk about these with like-minded people.

"This is what we are trying to facilitate, making it a pleasurable experience."

Mr Daisley has run the European arm of Twitter for seven years and was previously UK managing director of YouTube. He is also host of the UK's number one business podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat and author of new bestselling book The Joy of Work.

He headlined an event in Ironbridge on Thursday, staged by the Marches Growth Hub, to encourage businesses capitalise on the digital revolution to boost growth.

"Technology has transformed all of our lives in the last 30 years, probably sweeping in another wave of industrial revolution," he says.

Fortunate

"I was fortunate spending four years running YouTube before I worked at Twitter and the pace of change is relentless.

"It is a big fear of big tech firms that someone in a garage somewhere will invent the next big thing.

"The Marches Growth Hub is trying to sow the seed for the next kid in a garage or someone who has started up a business but needs some help getting it going.

"Technology should be an application to solve a problem. When Twitter was created it never had the best technology. In fact still today it does not use the best technology compared with what's out there. But it solved what some people regarded as a need.

"Facebook, Google, all these things, spend more time thinking about the problem than the technology they are using."

Cartoon

Born on a council estate in Birmingham, Mr Daisley says it was a cartoon CV he produced that helped change his life.

"I was the first in my family to go to university. I came back from university and every job application I did I got no responses or job offers.

"So I drew a four-page cartoon of my life. Immediately, I went from no one replying to me to receiving phone calls with every job application and offers of work experience.

"When you do a job application you Google CVs and click on the first link and fill in the first template. Is it any surprise everyone else does that?

"If you saw mine it looks rubbish but it was different than everyone else's. That cartoon has changed my life."