You might think that with the whole Elon Musk takeover deal currently being put on hold that Twitter would be put in stasis as we all wait for what’s next. If you did, then you’d be wrong. As evidenced by current CEO Parag Agrawal’s recent management reshuffle, Twitter is still pushing ahead, despite the likely major changes in the Elon era.
Indicated By Tags
Twitter continues to experiment with new features too, with the latest update in testing being new Tweet labels that could be added to Tweets, providing more context around certain engagements. Based on this example by TechCrunch, Twitter’s working on a new, in-stream label that would signify when a Tweet author has liked a reply. In a similar test, Twitter’s also now highlighting the replies of select Tweet authors, with alternate text color and a mic icon next to the comment.
Twitter, in varying forms, has been working on this since 2018. Perhaps it was a pet project of Agrawal back when he was just Twitter’s CTO. The idea is that this will prompt more engagement by alerting users to comments that the author deems as ‘most relevant’. At the same time, it also gives fans more recognition in comment streams.
Recognition is a big element of the social media experience for fans – better highlighting such interaction could become a community-building tool, potentially prompting more famous people to interact in replies more often. As Elon Musk told us, the famous people on the app apparently don’t even use it, which is also one of his major criticisms of the app that he aims to ‘fix’. Ever since, Muk has floated his many ‘vague’ solutions, including the idea of having people pay for embedding Tweets from high-profile users. It sounds very unworkable if you ask us, still, it’s one of the areas that Musk has in sight of his grand Twitter revival plan.
Outside of this use case, it’s still unsure if this feature would add a lot, but extra engagement is always a positive. Twitter’s current projects, as recently noted by Agrawal, need to keep throwing things at the wall, in hopes that something sticks. Another similar tagging project on this front is its ‘Vibes’ status update experiment, which would see a custom status attached to your Tweets. This would help add more context to the Tweet experience and could come in handy for people attending events.
Though this hasn’t been a major concern over the past few years, with nearly every event being virtually canceled, this does appear to be the primary use case, with all of these elements helping to provide more engagement prompts with the app’s various aspects.
The Wrap
While it still seems unlikely that Twitter will shift the needle much on engagement, maybe, altogether, they will – if Twitter’s working on these now, it might as well push them out, ideally before Elon steps in and changes the company’s entire focus to incorporating more memes. While they can, they should push to implement pending initiatives.
Subscribe to our‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.
Please note:
This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin.
Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
