(2021-04-06) What's Next For Twitter

Tom Jarvis: What's next for Twitter? The platform has been looking to turn attention away from politics and back on the product. First they launched “Fleets” – Twitter’s answer to Stories on other platforms, which it launched at the back-end of 2020.

This was closely followed in late January by the pilot launch of Birdwatch, a community-based approach to tackling misinformation on the platform. Birdwatch allows people to identify Tweets they believe are misleading and write notes that provide informative context.

Twitter was launching not one but two new features: Communities, and Super Followers.

Communities was the platform's answer to Facebook Groups and an extension of the work they have been doing around topics to encourage new and existing users to more easily engage with and follow conversations around areas of interest and passion points.

Super Followers is a bigger swing for Twitter, looking at monetizing engagement on the platform for its biggest and most ardent users. Seemingly having watched the success of platforms such as Substack and Patreon, Twitter is looking for ways to help creators profit from the content they share

Twitter users will be able to charge their followers for access to additional content, such as a subscription to a newsletter, access to a fan community, bonus tweets, or even just a badge on users’ profiles to show they support an individual.

Earlier this month Twitter made another product announcement, confirming that their beta test of Spaces, their audio room feature and Clubhouse competitor, will roll out to the wider public later in April.

Here are my two predictions for Twitter in the coming 18 months (beyond that I think it’s anyone’s guess); firstly, that Twitter is to go long-form, moving even further away from its 110 character origins to offer users the chance to post longer-form written and video content. Secondly, I predict they will double-down on Live (real-time) making the most of a key advantage of the platform in its ability to break in-the-moment stories from around the world.

Why do I think that Twitter will embrace long-form written content? Because it needs to give creators the opportunity to offer greater value to their followers. This value exchange from creators to followers is seemingly the driving reason behind Twitter’s acquisition of newsletter platform, Revue.

...opens up a world of opportunities for writers and content creators. It also positions Twitter differently from other platforms as a place to go to absorb deeper content on a particular topic or from a specific writer as well as understanding their views in a snapshot from their tweets. It neatly positions Twitter as a frontrunner in breaking news and editorial journalism of any kind.

This should support new and greater opportunities to monetize that attention

as Kayvon Beykpour told the Verge when asked about Super Followers: “Our goal is not for Twitter to make money. Our goal is for creators to make money.”

The second area I think we are going to see Twitter develop new tools and products for is around breaking news and in particular, live video... Facebook leads the way in Live video.