Twitter has posted media related to its upcoming IPO Roadshow, scheduled to begin next week. The video accompanying the posting unites Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, who all pitch the company to investors together.
Seeing all of the founders together pitching the company wouldn’t be such a strange thing with any other firm. But there have been some recent revelations care of the NYT’s Nick Bilton’s new book about Twitter. Tension between Williams and Dorsey has been central to the accounts we’ve seen so far.
Dicing apart the video a bit we see the evolution of Twitter laid out in succinct bursts. A simple timeline, which begins with Jack’s famous “Setting up my Twittr” tweet, stretches out. And then there is the canonical Twitter experience, which they describe as a “simple” concept.
The video then quickly turns to Twitter’s first major utility application: breaking news. Important events that were either broken or discussed heavily on Twitter flash on the screen.
CEO Dick Costolo also makes an appearance, emphasizing that with Twitter, you’re in the middle of a conversation rather than a passive observer to a “broadcast” platform. Which, in the end, is the ideal but not always the reality for Twitter which has had some difficulty getting a large portion of its users to actually contribute to those conversations.
After that, there is a bunch of media and a heavy emphasis of Twitter cards, including those showing off Twitter’s Vine video platform.
Notably, after all of its forays into media and entertainment, Twitter has just turned its focus back towards fostering the news capabilities of the platform. Just yesterday it hired a Head of News in NBC’s Vivian Schiller, who will work on building tools for newshounds and journalists to use on Twitter. She is also in charge of making sure that people making news view Twitter as a true broadcast platform.
The roadshow video putting such an emphasis on news is no accident. As we mentioned when we talked about its new breaking news notification experiment @eventparrot, Twitter is wise to build up the platform as a place to find out things first. Mirroring media found elsewhere on the web or on TV is fine and dandy, but news comes to Twitter first in many instances, and it’s important to foster that, as Twitter struggles to grow its user base at a rapid clip.
Costolo stresses the news aspects in his pitch, saying that Twitter is “the place to find out what’s happening, right now,” and highlights @jkrums Flight 1549 Hudson rescue tweet as an example. “Twitter users,” Costolo continues, “receive content on Twitter faster than any other media.”
And, not to be forgotten, brands get a mention as Costolo explains how Twitter enables ‘true one-to-one’ marketing.
There is an extended presentation, about 40 minutes long, that you can watch here that goes through all of the growth figures, statistics and more. It’s narrated by Costolo and you can watch it here.