New Twitter ads ignore the site’s Nazi problem and admit another major issue

Even after 11 years of existence, Twitter is still trying to explain the basics of the product.

New ads, released Wednesday, show two scenarios of two different men joining the social network and struggling to understand what to do next. Comedian Romesh Ranganathan tries to calm them down and then walks through the steps of using Twitter.

Twitter is also updating about.twitter.com by adding a "Let's Go" Twitter page that clearly outlines, with visuals, the steps to sign-up for Twitter and start following accounts.

Despite being over a decade old, it's not surprising that Twitter is still convincing people to sign up and helping them get through the process. Twitter has struggled to spur user growth pretty much since it began publicly trading in 2013. In fact, Twitter's user base has declined in some quarters and stayed stagnant in others.

But Twitter is hoping to ignite that user growth again as it commits to being a profitable company. It can't rely on the so-called "Trump bump." Of course, President Trump isn't the only one tweeting, as these ads show.

These ads will run in the U.S., U.K., and Canada on digital properties including Sony, Pandora, and Amazon. They also will appear in paid search across social networks. In the U.K., they will run in cinema. They won't appear on television, unlike previous ads.

This series is the third major campaign under Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland, who was hired in January 2016 to serve as the company's first-ever CMO. The first series defined Twitter as "What's happening" and included outdoor ads. The second campaign titled #SeeEverySide featured ads spots on a heat wave, GOAT sport stars, and Chance the Rapper to show why people use the service.

With these ads, Twitter is elaborating on how.

"Today, we answer the question How to use Twitter for those who haven’t yet taken the plunge," Berland wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

One of the reasons to abandon Twitter or not sign-up in the first place is the prevalence of neo-Nazis and other trolls on the platform. Twitter has been trying to fix that with new tools to curb abuse and an upcoming crackdown on user behavior, even monitoring outside the service.

Another reason is the burden of building a feed. Anecdotally, I heard that concern just this past week. A friend of mine who's an engineer at a New York City startup said he wanted to re-join Twitter (he has an abandoned account from high school) and added that the biggest barrier was not understanding who to follow and feeling that it would take awhile to create a good feed.

Still, the struggle of creating a quality feed doesn't end. I shared with my friend that I still stress over my feed since I follow more than 4,000 accounts. I use services like TweetDeck to make lists, but as he noted, not everyone is on Twitter all day like myself.

Twitter isn't speaking to me, or my fellow power users, in these ads. Rather, it's showing the average day internet user (the people who are on Facebook, perhaps) that signing up for Twitter can be easy and rewarding. Since shifting away from a purely chronological feed and adding features like the Explore tab, Twitter is trying to surface quality, personalized content more to new and old users.

As Berland wrote in the blog post, Twitter wants people to take the "plunge." It would prefer if they stuck around, too.