You may have hopped on Twitter recently and noticed the all-too-familiar circles lined up horizontally on the top of your feed. We knew exactly what Twitter had done. Twitter’s newest update introduces “Fleets,” also known as Twitter stories. Twitter is the last major social media app to recently gain this feature since Facebook in 2017.
Social media stories are fun ways to share photography or creativity without the commitment of an actual post. Snapchat and Instagram do it well, but do we really need stories for every social media application? The initial thought was that Twitter is too chaotic to pull off these fleets, and therefore deemed unnecessary.
After the frustration at Twitter for being a bandwagon, we were reminded of how Instagram stories were first perceived. Hardly anyone liked them and there was a common annoyance for how they basically stole Snapchat’s unique feature of stories. Nowadays, Instagram stories are so widely-used and enjoyable, that it is difficult to remember a time where there was this collective annoyance for them, which can now be argued as the same situation for Twitter.
Depending on the type of user, this new feature could actually be quite beneficial. A tweet that will disappear after a day and will only be viewable to those who click on it means that there is a lot less pressure now to share whatever the user wants. Businesses could share simple wins or discussions that they would not necessarily deem worthy of a more professional or promotional tweet. Users could share a picture or tweet that they may worry would not get a lot of feedback if they actually posted it to their timeline.
The next question is, should you be optimizing your Twitter Fleets for your business and brand? The answer, much like many other social media tactics, is if the shoe fits! If your industry or business depends on the social engagements and timeliness of Twitter’s content, you should definitely be using this controversial new feature for your brand. While it may seem overwhelming at first, Twitter Fleets provides professional accounts the opportunity to promote content in an even more bite-sized fashion than a Tweet. The average Twitter consumer’s attention span isn’t getting any shorter and for a platform already known for its rapid pace, Fleets provides brands with more room to saturate.
