Twitter Inc., trying to put recent management changes behind it and build its business, is taking steps to broaden the appeal of the well-known messaging service.

Twitter is making a concerted effort to educate its users about what, exactly, it is. WSJ's Amir Efrati explains why to Stacey Delo.

The San Francisco company, which lets users broadcast and view short messages, wants to make it easier for new users to navigate the service and help longtime users find interesting content.
While Twitter has more than 200 million registered accounts, it doesn't say how many are active users. Users discuss a variety of topics, but some people—especially adults—view the service as a vehicle for celebrities to broadcast their thoughts online.
Twitter wants to show how the service works to first-time users by highlighting tweets from people in their geographic regions, such as local politicians and musicians, when they first sign on, people familiar with the matter said.
Jonathan Strauss, chief executive of Awe.sm, which tracks marketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook Inc., argues that Twitter needs to attract more mainstream Internet users if it wants to justify its multibillion-dollar valuation. "Most people understand Twitter exists, but they don't understand what Twitter is and how they can participate," he said.
For more experienced users, Twitter is developing ways to create a narrower stream of the most relevant tweets rather than requiring users to wade through messages in chronological order.
As it looks to add tools for power users, Twitter is also in advanced talks to purchase a program used by many Twitter users to view and manage tweets, Tweetdeck, for around $50 million, people familiar with the matter said.

Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder, recently returned as its product chief. He has become more active advising the company.

It is unclear when the changes will be introduced or how Twitter may use Tweetdeck. A spokesman for Twitter, which has made seven small acquisitions to date, declined to comment. TweetDeck Inc.'s chief executive, Iain Dodsworth, couldn't be reached.
The moves come as Jack Dorsey, the founding chief executive of the four-year-old company, formally returned as product chief three weeks ago after being pushed out by the board two-and-a-half years ago.
Mr. Dorsey remained chairman of Twitter's board after his ouster, and also leads a mobile-payments company named Square Inc. Mr. Dorsey has been laying out his vision for Twitter to its executives, said a person familiar with the matter.
Twitter allows users to post messages of up to 140 characters in length, and those messages can be viewed by other users. People log on—often through their mobile phones—to track everything from sporting events to transportation delays to natural disasters. Egyptians, for example, used the service to organize revolutionary protests earlier this year.
The company has been slower to build a business around its popularity than some other Web players, such as Facebook. The research firm eMarketer puts Twitter 2010 ad revenue at $45 million and expects ad revenue to reach $150 million this year.
Yet Twitter investors are buying up shares of the privately held company on secondary exchanges or through individual middlemen. Twitter completed a financing at the end of last year that valued the company at around $4 billion, though it has argued for higher valuations in low-level talks with potential acquirers, including Google Inc., people familiar with the matter have said.
The company this year will try to make the breadth of its content more visible to first-time visitors, helping them quickly discover information about stocks, sports and other organizations and individuals they care about, the people familiar with the matter said.
One possibility is showcasing tweets by well-known people or organizations located in the user's region, or from certain types of users, such as athletes or musicians.
Twitter users already have created thousands of "lists" in which such content on specific topics is grouped together, and Twitter is looking at ways to promote such lists, said a person familiar with the matter.
Twitter is also exploring concepts similar to a Facebook technology called "EdgeRank" that highlights posts by a user's closest friends—an effort that is being aided by Ashish Goel, a Twitter research fellow and Stanford University professor, these people said.
"Most of the time what people want is the most relevant and important information, and without filtering its content for individual users that's difficult for Twitter to satisfy," said Awe.sm's Mr. Strauss.