You could call Twitter a “social news media” or a social media. Like the aforementioned businesses, Twitter is a prime illustration of the usefulness and applicability of growth hacking because it overcame the unusual challenge of rapidly gaining and losing customers.
Strategic marketing and advertising had helped Twitter gain a strong reputation as a social information medium. Twitter’s marketing campaign resulted in massive user participation, which sparked an enthusiastic response from millions of people in a relatively short amount of time. And while this was happening, Twitter started to see a worrying trend: its users were leaving in droves.
Twitter’s growth hacking strategy relied on user testing and data mining to learn more about how people actually use the service, which in turn led to a redesign that prioritised the user’s experience. Before the redesign, users weren’t particularly invested in the platform because they had little reason to stick around without any friends to play with.
Nonetheless, after the autosuggestion feature was implemented, which supplied a large list of potential followers, users found the platform to be significantly more interesting, and retention rates increased dramatically. After extensive user testing and redesign, Twitter saw a rise in retention rates as users no longer faced the same difficulty they had when first signing up.
As twitter so eloquently demonstrates, this growth hacking technique is essential to increasing sales, conversion rates, and overall profitability.
Source: www.growth-hackers.net