Jack Dorsey wants to take Twitter mainstream
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Jack Dorsey is looking to take Twitter to the mainstream.
The co-founder is stepping into a new full-time job as executive chairman to lead product development, all while maintaining his CEO position at his mobile payments start-up, Square.
Dorsey is also looking to bite into Facebook’s dominance in advertising among social media companies, he told students in a lecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism on Tuesday.
‘We have a lot of mainstream awareness, but mainstream relevancy is still a challenge,’ Dorsey said, according to a report on the lecture from the Wall Street Journal.
To that end, Twitter will have to become ‘more approachable so that people can get into it immediately and it’s extremely relevant right away,’ he said at Columbia, according to Bloomberg.
Particularly, Twitter needs to become easier to use and navigate for those using the micro-blogging site to get information and simply tweet about what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, the Journal report said.
A strength of Twitter, Dorsey said, is the ability for users to follow what they’re interested in, according to the Journal.
‘What’s happening in Egypt right now. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ So we need to refocus on that value,’ Dorsey said. ‘That’s my goal in the next few months.’
Dorsey’s return to a full-time job at Twitter follows the move of Dick Costolo to the CEO spot in October after previous chief executive Evan Williams, also a company co-founder, stepped down.
Williams had been CEO at Twitter since 2008, and before him, Dorsey was chief executive going back to the San Francisco company’s founding in 2007.
Dorsey assured those in attendance at Columbia that his new full-time role at Twitter won’t impede his leadership at Square, which he started in 2009.
‘I live across street from Square, and Square is two blocks from Twitter,’ he said, according to the Journal. ‘I live and breathe these companies.’
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles