Are Twitter's New Experiments Failing to Gain Traction and Could Lead to Major Changes at the App?
A new article on Social Media Today reports that over the past few months, Twitter has significantly accelerated its development velocity, with new features like Fleets, Twitter Blue, Super Follows, Spaces, Communities and more all coming in quick succession.
Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour recently lauded the efforts of his team on this front, crediting internal culture, and a new strategic vision, for its improvements. But the question here is 'are these really improvements?'
There's no denying that Twitter has dragged its feet on this front for too long. But are its experiments actually going to pay off? And if they don't, what then?
Fleets
Twitter launched Fleets for all users in November 2020, then shut it down last month, giving it less than a year of operation before pulling the pin. Which it should have done, and Twitter received some praise for having the courage to test something new, then admitting when it had failed.
Super Follows
Another of Twitter's experiments is also stumbling in its early stages, with its Super Follows creator subscriber offering only generating around $6000 in its first two weeks. Super Follows is only available in the US and Canada right now, and two weeks is not an indicative enough time period to write it off as a failure, especially considering that creators will need time to formulate their paid subscription offerings in order to entice people to subscribe to them. But $6000 off the back of a product launch is not great, especially when you also consider that Twitter has over 37 million daily active users in the US.<
At the minimum price point for Super Follows ($2.99), that would suggest that only 2 thousand users - or 0.005% of Twitter's US user base - has subscribed to anyone in the app. And that's at the most generous estimate.
Twitter Blue
There's also Twitter Blue, its subscription add-on option, which enables users to pay for additional features like tweet recall and new color options. Twitter Blue is currently available in Australia and Canada, and we don't have any stats on usage as yet, but the options on offer are not overly compelling, and it'll be interesting to see whether people are willing to keep paying a monthly fee to access these new features (anecdotal sentiment seems to suggest that most subscribers found the features interesting, but not worth the extra cost).
Twitter Communities
Twitter launched Communities last week, and again, we don't have any definitive data on its performance as yet, but a quick look through the current communities on offer doesn't suggest that it's 'taking off' as yet. The idea of Communities makes sense - people don't always want to share their comments with all of their followers, so Communities provides a way to have more enclosed group discussion in the app.
Twitter launched Communities last week, and again, we don't have any definitive data on its performance as yet, but a quick look through the current communities on offer doesn't suggest that it's 'taking off' as yet. The idea of Communities makes sense - people don't always want to share their comments with all of their followers, so Communities provides a way to have more enclosed group discussion in the app.
Twitter Spaces
Spaces, which latched onto the Clubhouse-led audio social trend, still seems to be showing some promise, and could still become a bigger element in the app, with the public nature of Twitter providing the best exposure potential of the current audio social platforms on offer. But discovery remains an issue, and when you also see Clubhouse's popularity in decline, it could be that audio streaming isn't as big a game-changer as some had anticipated.
Conclusion
The problem is, most of these additions are solutions looking for problems - they're additional pieces in the Twitter puzzle which look like they should be there, but maybe, ultimately don't fit.
Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour recently lauded the efforts of his team on this front, crediting internal culture, and a new strategic vision, for its improvements. But the question here is 'are these really improvements?'
There's no denying that Twitter has dragged its feet on this front for too long. But are its experiments actually going to pay off? And if they don't, what then?
Fleets
Twitter launched Fleets for all users in November 2020, then shut it down last month, giving it less than a year of operation before pulling the pin. Which it should have done, and Twitter received some praise for having the courage to test something new, then admitting when it had failed.
Super Follows
Another of Twitter's experiments is also stumbling in its early stages, with its Super Follows creator subscriber offering only generating around $6000 in its first two weeks. Super Follows is only available in the US and Canada right now, and two weeks is not an indicative enough time period to write it off as a failure, especially considering that creators will need time to formulate their paid subscription offerings in order to entice people to subscribe to them. But $6000 off the back of a product launch is not great, especially when you also consider that Twitter has over 37 million daily active users in the US.<
At the minimum price point for Super Follows ($2.99), that would suggest that only 2 thousand users - or 0.005% of Twitter's US user base - has subscribed to anyone in the app. And that's at the most generous estimate.
Twitter Blue
There's also Twitter Blue, its subscription add-on option, which enables users to pay for additional features like tweet recall and new color options. Twitter Blue is currently available in Australia and Canada, and we don't have any stats on usage as yet, but the options on offer are not overly compelling, and it'll be interesting to see whether people are willing to keep paying a monthly fee to access these new features (anecdotal sentiment seems to suggest that most subscribers found the features interesting, but not worth the extra cost).
Twitter Communities
Twitter launched Communities last week, and again, we don't have any definitive data on its performance as yet, but a quick look through the current communities on offer doesn't suggest that it's 'taking off' as yet. The idea of Communities makes sense - people don't always want to share their comments with all of their followers, so Communities provides a way to have more enclosed group discussion in the app.
Twitter launched Communities last week, and again, we don't have any definitive data on its performance as yet, but a quick look through the current communities on offer doesn't suggest that it's 'taking off' as yet. The idea of Communities makes sense - people don't always want to share their comments with all of their followers, so Communities provides a way to have more enclosed group discussion in the app.
Twitter Spaces
Spaces, which latched onto the Clubhouse-led audio social trend, still seems to be showing some promise, and could still become a bigger element in the app, with the public nature of Twitter providing the best exposure potential of the current audio social platforms on offer. But discovery remains an issue, and when you also see Clubhouse's popularity in decline, it could be that audio streaming isn't as big a game-changer as some had anticipated.
Conclusion
The problem is, most of these additions are solutions looking for problems - they're additional pieces in the Twitter puzzle which look like they should be there, but maybe, ultimately don't fit.
