The date was the 3rd August 2021; the day Fleets left the Twitter realm. When first introduced on the platform in November 2020, many saw fleets as a carbon copy of their counterparts such as Instagram which has a stories function so the lines seemed a bit blurred. However, that wasn’t Twitter’s aim for Fleets.
Some users felt anxious about tweeting their thoughts or trying to encapsulate what was on their minds in 280 characters. Fleets were devised to allow people to have more long and meaningful conversations on the platform and share their fleeting thoughts without feeling any kind of pressure. In theory, this makes sense but in practice, this didn’t come to fruition as Twitter had hoped.
By looking at data, Fleets didn’t have an increase in new people joining the conversation as was expected but instead of trying to carry on, Twitter made a wise decision (in my opinion) to end this function. Creativity can spark innovation and innovation can create change but if something isn’t working there is no point flogging a dead horse as the expression goes but to learn from it which Twitter is doing and to improve.
The platform has learned from its findings on Fleets that:
- People are already using Twitter were using Fleets to amplify their tweets to get more traction and people involved in their conversations. Twitter is working on ways to encourage more people to tweet and address what may be holding people back from using the platform.
- A picture paints a thousand words and visuals such as pictures and videos were a strong component in Fleets. Twitter is now looking at testing ways they can incorporate visuals more in their Twitter composer including GIF stickers.
Twitter is deemed as the platform to be conversational and voice opinions, when it was first created in 2006 it had 140 characters then moved to 280 but the purpose of this was to have short and succinct conversations like people do when they are texting and it is more personal. Credit has to be given to the platform for striving to continue to look at ways to improve and create more meaningful conversations. Ilya Brown the VP of Consumer Product for Twitter stated “We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter”.
What you would like to see improve on Twitter? Let me know your thoughts. Will we also finally get to see the long-overdue edit button? Only time will. What we do know though for sure, is that in the next months there will be changes on the platform which should hopefully be beneficial to the platform and its users.
Until next time…
Emmanuel #EKsMarketingViews
eksmarketingviews.wordpress.com 