Twitter vs Whatsapp (Nigeria Market fit & Improvement ideas)

Twitter and Whatsapp are both social media platforms, but they serve different purposes. Twitter is a microblogging and social networking platform, while WhatsApp is a messaging app that helps users to text, chat, and exchange media with individuals or communities, including voice messages and video. The idea was to develop a messaging app that would show “status next to the name of the person” so that users could see whether or not the person is available.

Twitter reportedly has 353 million daily active users. Twitter is most common among people aged 25 to 34. Twitter accounts for 10% of the worldwide social media user base (source: Statista). WhatsApp has over 2 billion active users worldwide. WhatsApp is the world’s most popular instant messaging app. In the case of WhatsApp, it is now the most popular chat app for people of all ages. 97% of users are between the ages of 18 and 29, 93% are between the ages of 30 and 49, and 79% are between the ages of 50 and 69. (Source: tyntec).

According to Digital Reports 2021, Nigeria has a population of 208.8 million people, only 33 million are engaged on social media, accounting for only 15.8 percent of the population. Meanwhile, the country has 104.4 million internet users. In terms of the most popular social media site in Nigeria in the third quarter of 2020, Whatsapp ranked first with 93 percent of internet users aged 16 to 64, while Twitter ranked sixth with 61.4 percent, this shows that Whatapp is a good market fit in Nigeria.

Whatsapp’s current business strategy is to increase their user base, but they also generate revenue from their business account. The aim of Whatsapp Business is to easily automate conversations with users, increase user interaction, and convert leads. Business users can send free messages within 24 hours of receiving the message but must pay a charge that varies by country if they reply after 24 hours.

As a Whatsapp user, I noticed the following pain points on Whatsapp and proposed some solutions:

1. The business account is hidden and can only be reached via the user chat with a business account. To expose the account to sales, I would recommend creating a business status that comprises of all business catalogs on the user contact but does not vanish after 24 hours like WhatsApp statuses. Making this visible will enable users to sign up for the business account, exposing them to sales and, as a result, increasing revenue. The bigger the customer base of a business, the more revenue that can be earned.
2. Having to switch between the Whatsapp status and Facebook stories platforms to share the same pictures and videos. This is a useful feature that allows you to conveniently link a Whatsapp post to Facebook stories.
3. Finally, I’ll tell you a story about the last pain spot. I was working on a volunteer project with several other individuals, and we decided to meet once a week to review and share the results of our different activities. The entire ordeal began with having to create a meeting on another platform (Platform B) just to be able to share our screen to see the progress of the project, sending numerous reminders or messaging on Whatsapp manually, having the meeting on platform B, and then going back to Whatsapp to drop takeaways from the meeting. I would recommend the online meeting feature here on Whatsapp.

In conclusion, WhatsApp and Twitter are excellent apps that have been iterating to enhance user experience. I assume that other users may not have been in this position or even find this as a pain point😀. The meeting scheduling feature will increase customer engagement and be an “excitement feature” categorizing using the Kano model on product prioritization framework, whereas the other two pain points above would be “performance features” (Kano model). The above review and improvement suggestions are based on my personal opinion as a Whatsapp user with a product-solving mindset. I recommend that further user research be conducted in order to create a valuable feature aimed at solving these problems while achieving the business goal.