Twitter announced earlier this month that it saw zero growth in its total user count, and in fact the numbers of total users has declined from 307 million to 305 million.

This significant decrease in users comes shortly after Socialmediatoday.com reported Twitter at the top of its listing of World’s 21 Most Important Social Media Sites and Apps in 2015. The words “tweet” and “hashtag” have become so common-placed in people’s lives, that one can’t look somewhere online and not see a reference to Twitter.

Twitter has often been compared to Facebook, although there are distinct differences between the two social media platforms. Facebook has been regarded as more user-friendly than Twitter because Facebook has a built in audience, friends who will comment, share and like the users posts and make the social media experience worthwhile.

However some feel that the Twitter fad is not over.

“I think it’s the most powerful social media platform in the world right now,” junior Daniel Falcones said. “If there’s any problems or complaints, people go on twitter and rant about them.”

The difference is that people on Twitter have found it tough to gain enough followers that they don’t even bother sending tweets. For those who have trouble finding an audience, they decide to drop Twitter and move on from it.

An unpopular change that Twitter recently made was changing the “favorite” star to a heart.

Students thought that this changed made Twitter feel more like other social media.

“[The heart] makes Twitter more like Facebook now,” sophomore Jeremy Berfer said.

The change to a heart to favorite tweets is taking away from the uniqueness of Twitter and making it feel more like its social media contemporaries.

Since 2013, Twitter’s growth rates have slowed from its fast start from 2007-2013, and its stock price has gone down 70 percent within the last year.

Twitter has tried to battle its declining number of users by launching its own TV commercials promoting some of their special new features.

Twitter has also worked to adjust users’ timelines that put the most important tweets since you last opened Twitter at the top.

The algorithmically sorted timeline should make Twitter more entertaining for those who only check it occasionally and better display tweets from new users so that they can gain more followers.

Twitter launched a new feature called Moments in an effort to increase its user growth in October 2015. Moments pulls together the best tweets on Twitter dealing with a particular topic, such as sports, entertainment and news.

Moments makes it so that you don’t have to constantly check Twitter to follow a story or event. Moments combine everything from Tweets, Vines, videos and GIFs to create a full blend of information.

Madhu Muthukumar, product manager of Moments, has described Moments as “a front door for Twitter, not a new house.”

Muthukumar hopes that Moments will welcome back users who have left Twitter. However, the lay out and the rate at which information is produced could turn users away.

“[Moments is] unnecessary because all that information is not needed when someone just wants to look at their own Twitter feed,”Berfer said.

Berfer’s sentiment is also felt by other Twitter users.

“I never look at the Moments,” Falcones said. “I’m worried more about what my friends and celebrities are saying than what the Moments are saying.”

Since Moments hasn’t had the desired effect to address Twitter’s growth problem, it is doubtful that the new timeline will help much either.

The one method that has proven to be profitable for Twitter has been increasing its advertising revenue per user by thirty-five percent. While Twitter users may not want to see more and more ads, it seems to be the only option to make Twitter a profitable company.

Twitter will continue to be used by millions of people, but the question remains, how can Twitter gain new users and keep them interested in the product so that it will rise in both its number of users and monetary value?