After report­ing slow rev­enue growth and decreased demand from adver­tis­ers, Twit­ter may be fac­ing a grim future – per­haps even of the MySpace vari­ety.

Ear­li­er this week, the micro-blog­ging plat­form also announced in a blog post that they are open­ing up Moments, the plat­for­m’s curat­ed news-feed, to a broad­er group of cre­ators and one includ­ing “influ­encers, part­ners, [and] brands”. It shows a greater deter­mi­na­tion from the com­pa­ny to increase ad rev­enues.

To gauge cur­rent opin­ion on the strug­gling social net­work’s future, we asked our dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing col­leagues to look into their crys­tal balls and divine whether Twit­ter has the capac­i­ty to save itself.

Here’s their take on what’s good, what’s bad – and what’s still uncer­tain:

The Good

Lucky for Twit­ter, it’s still arguably the best plat­form to dis­trib­ute news.

In fact, Mal­colm Gray, social media man­ag­er of enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny Live Nation, not­ed Twit­ter is the first place many con­sumers go for break­ing news and trends.

“Twit­ter still punch­es far above its weight in cur­rent events and news,” agreed Christo­pher Penn, vice pres­i­dent of mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy at data-dri­ven PR agency Shift Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. “In an elec­tion year, Twit­ter receives dis­pro­por­tion­ate atten­tion, which means greater audi­ence aware­ness and engage­ment for every­one.”

How­ev­er, Matthew Kaskav­itch, social media man­ag­er and lec­tur­er in the Depart­ment of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Den­ver, not­ed Twit­ter is con­sid­er­ing imple­ment­ing an algo­rithm instead of show­ing tweets in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order, which would help adver­tis­ers, but come at the detri­ment of user expe­ri­ence.

“Twit­ter users turn to Twit­ter for the lat­est news, par­tic­u­lar­i­ty when things [web­sites] are break­ing. How­ev­er, for Twit­ter to mon­e­tize, [it needs] to lure adver­tis­ers with the tools need­ed to tar­get spe­cif­ic audi­ences and keep peo­ple con­sum­ing and avoid infor­ma­tion over­load. Those two things are at odds with each oth­er, which is why Twit­ter is stuck in a tough spot.”

Matthew Kaskav­itch

At the same time, access and engage­ment is anoth­er huge weapon in Twitter’s arse­nal.

“No oth­er social media site makes it so easy to get instant access to celebri­ties, key influ­encers and fans around the world,” said Liz Kel­ly, founder of Goody PR and UCLA Exten­sion instruc­tor on new media mar­ket­ing. “The main les­son is that engage­ment is the most impor­tant thing on Twit­ter. Twit­ter could be even more pop­u­lar if [it] pro­vid­ed users with more lis­ten­ing tools to inter­act with more like­mind­ed peo­ple.”

The Bad

How­ev­er, Twit­ter is a noisy plat­form, said Eric Quanstrom, CMO of sales prospect­ing soft­ware Kit­eDesk.

“Once any indi­vid­ual reach­es more than a few hundred…followers, the ratio of noise to sig­nal is quite heavy,” he added. “Any­one that has hun­dreds — let alone thou­sands or mil­lions — of fol­low­ers knows they can­not even remote­ly keep up with the feed.”

And that’s part of the rea­son Twit­ter has strug­gled with adver­tis­ing, Quanstrom said.

“If you can­not get peo­ple to pay atten­tion to their own feed, you can­not reach audi­ences cost effec­tive­ly,” he added.

What’s more, accord­ing to Tom Siebert of PPC, SEO and con­tent mar­ket­ing agency Wolf­gang Solo, Twit­ter’s biggest — and most­ly unac­knowl­edged — prob­lem is that a lot of its users are “bots and shills.”

“The bot echo cham­ber dur­ing the elec­tion sea­son so far has been crazy,” he said. “Most peo­ple know it [and] Twit­ter is losing…credibility for it, but refus­es to admit it.”

To wit: Look no fur­ther than the recent expe­ri­ence of SNL and Ghost­busters actor Leslie Jones.

“Long term, I think they get increas­ing­ly mar­gin­al­ized,” Siebert added. “And it’s such a cesspool of anony­mous hate, it’s tough for adver­tis­ers to real­ly want to get on board, espe­cial­ly when the ROI is ques­tion­able.”

Fur­ther, John Turn­er, CEO of feed­back tool User­s­Think, not­ed even basic changes in the prod­uct, such as requir­ing email ver­i­fi­ca­tion when set­ting up a new account, could do a lot to stop trolls from set­ting up new accounts.

But Turn­er also said Twit­ter has an onboard­ing prob­lem and “Twit­ter seems to be avoid­ing deal­ing with either con­cern, by both adding extra fea­tures to [its] prod­uct that only con­fuse things, and by seem­ing to make no prod­uct changes to deal with trolling and harass­ment.”

As a result, Turn­er said he thinks Twit­ter is still a won­der­ful plat­form for mar­ket­ing and inter­ac­tions and the pseu­do-anony­mous nature can be ben­e­fi­cial for some users who don’t want to ful­ly rep­re­sent them­selves, but if they don’t do more to help new users and deal with harass­ment, it will begin to shrink.”

And it is Twitter’s reluc­tance to change at a pace rel­a­tive to oth­er net­works that might be hin­der­ing its progress as well.

“Users always com­plain that Face­book is chang­ing things, but you’ll notice they’re the ones who have fig­ured it out and are con­sis­tent­ly grow­ing and mak­ing prof­it,” Kaskav­itch said. “Twit­ter needs to con­tin­ue to take cal­cu­lat­ed and bold action to progress [its] plat­form for­ward.”

The Uncertain

But Gray not­ed Twit­ter retains an advan­tage over oth­er plat­forms when it comes to live events.

“Whether it’s a Black Lives Mat­ter protest, a polit­i­cal con­ven­tion, the NBA finals or The Walk­ing Dead, Twit­ter is the place for com­mu­ni­ties to gath­er and talk about their inter­ests in real time. This is still very impor­tant,” he said. “Twit­ter is also still impor­tant for keep­ing peo­ple hon­est. Dur­ing the recent police shoot­ings in Dal­las, Dal­las PD tweet­ed out a pic­ture of a man who they sus­pect­ed to be the shoot­er, but due to videos post­ed on Twit­ter dur­ing the ral­ly, Twit­ter users quick­ly iden­ti­fied that their sus­pect was on the ground and not the actu­al shoot­er. This is still the most pow­er­ful way for com­mu­ni­ties to watch and engage with each oth­er.”

And so it’s per­haps not sur­pris­ing that live con­tent has been an area of focus for the plat­form late­ly. In fact, Twit­ter has made a big push into live sports in par­tic­u­lar, includ­ing live streams of upcom­ing MLB and NHL games, as well as a night­ly sports high­lights show called “The Ral­ly.” This fol­lowed announce­ments of a stream­ing part­ner­ship with the NFL for Thurs­day Night Foot­ball and a live con­tent part­ner­ship with the NBA.

“Twit­ter’s live sports push is its best chance at stay­ing rel­e­vant and gain­ing mar­ket share in video,” said Andreas Goel­di, CTO of video adver­tis­ing plat­form Pix­a­bil­i­ty. “Twit­ter is already the plat­form for adver­tis­ers who want to cap­ture view­er atten­tion dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar event with a lot of focus and imme­di­a­cy, so extend­ing this to live video stream­ing is a log­i­cal next step.”

The abil­i­ty to watch sports on Twit­ter while also fol­low­ing dis­cus­sions fol­lows a broad­er trend in media con­sump­tion, added Vas­silis Dalakas, Pro­fes­sor of Mar­ket­ing at Cal State San Mar­cos.

“We’ll still have TVs and still watch, but I think all those oth­er plat­forms allow­ing us to watch is a good idea,” Dalakas said. “The cool thing about Twitter…is we go there for social inter­ac­tion and watch­ing sports for most of us is a social expe­ri­ence, so this will be like a vir­tu­al sports bar.”

Luke Wat­son, plat­forms expert at live stream­ing net­work Roker Media, agreed Twitter’s focus on sports as a con­tent type that demands real-time atten­tion and com­mands large-scale audi­ence con­ver­sions could help the plat­form main­tain main­stream rel­e­van­cy, not to men­tion solve a legit prob­lem for sports fans who are blacked out of watch­ing their favorite teams.

“All of that said, will the strat­e­gy work? I think that it will require more than sports con­tent to save Twit­ter,” Wat­son said. “This, com­bined with an over­haul of its core prod­ucts, may be enough to main­tain rel­e­vance or even grow, but a com­plete inte­gra­tion of Periscope, which has remained vir­tu­al­ly unchanged since it debuted in March of 2015 despite the launch and con­tin­u­al improve­ment of com­peti­tors, would go a long way toward speed­ing pos­i­tive change and restor­ing the con­fi­dence of exist­ing users.”

Bri­an Shin, CEO of video ana­lyt­ics firm Vis­i­ble Mea­sures, agreed, say­ing Twit­ter needs to cre­ate a bet­ter view­ing expe­ri­ence as “from a con­sumer per­spec­tive, [Twit­ter] is still kind of a mess, even with Moments.”

For his part, Noel McCann, mar­ket­ing ana­lyst at short-term hous­ing site Home­Suite, is opti­mistic, say­ing the live streams and the removal of the char­ac­ter lim­it “give mar­keters an oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate more demo­graph­ic-focused cam­paigns.”

This will also improve the effec­tive­ness of out­reach to poten­tial cus­tomers, thus bring­ing the plat­form back up to speed with oth­er plat­forms, he added.

Fur­ther, Penn said Twit­ter is test­ing reach and fre­quen­cy buy­ing, which will per­mit mar­keters to con­trol how often their ads are seen.

“This fea­ture, once rolled out to mar­keters, will let us bet­ter con­trol spend on our Twit­ter ads by cap­ping our ads’ fre­quen­cy – a long over­due improve­ment,” he said. “Twit­ter also con­tin­ues to push for more video ads. If you’re cur­rent­ly exe­cut­ing video ads on oth­er plat­forms, expect to port them to Twit­ter with greater ease.”

In addi­tion, Penn point­ed to Twitter’s upcom­ing tran­si­tion from its exist­ing tag­ging solu­tion to a Uni­ver­sal Web­site tag.

“If you’ve imple­ment­ed Facebook’s new con­ver­sion pix­el, you have some idea of what to expect,” he said. “Our advice is to use Google Tag Man­ag­er to imple­ment and con­trol these many new tags. Doing so will sub­stan­tial­ly reduce your mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy bur­den.”

What’s more, Penn said Twitter’s Audi­ence Plat­form expects to offer new options includ­ing cross-device ads lat­er this year.

“Twit­ter cit­ed a 52 per­cent lift in pur­chase intent for con­sumers who saw ads on mul­ti­ple devices ver­sus one device,” he added. “Over­all, Twitter’s focus on dri­ving down cost-per-engage­ment to be more com­pa­ra­ble with oth­er social net­works can only be good news for mar­keters with increas­ing­ly tight bud­gets as we move into the sec­ond half of the year.”