Twitter Names Jack Dorsey CEO, Pushing To The Future With A Name From Its Past

Dorsey, a co-founder, will try to jump start the social network's growth and advertising business. Adam Bain, former chief of revenue and partnerships, has been named COO.

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Twitter has officially returned to its roots. This morning, the company introduced co-founder Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO, removing the interim stamp he has operated under for the last four months.

The move was announced with an SEC filing and a series of tweets from Dorsey, who is also the CEO of mobile payments startup Square. The company also named Adam Bain chief of revenue and partnerships and reportedly another CEO candidate as chief operating officer. Former CEO Dick Costolo, who stepped down on July 1, has left the company’s board of directors.

Dorsey officially takes over a publicly traded company struggling to gain momentum and the confidence of investors. Twitter stock has been hovering around its IPO price of $26 a share for much of the summer. In early trading today, it was slightly above that mark. The main issue for Wall Street is that Twitter has had difficulty gaining ground with the average user, as indicated by slowing growth in monthly active users. Twitter has 316 million MAUs (monthly average users) compared to Facebook’s 1.5 billion. Twitter has also been passed by another Facebook property, Instagram, which now has 400 million users.

Dorsey aims to push Twitter ahead by making the service easier to use for newcomers. One such effort, Project Lightning, is expected to launch soon and give people on Twitter a better curated experience around live events. The company has long dominated the internet conversation surrounded major news and entertainment events — the Super Bowl, for instance — but still has the perception of being a confusing place for the uninitiated. Dorsey and company are hoping to change that perception and continue to improve the advertising products that fuel its business.

Here’s Dorsey’s tweet-storm announcement:


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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