Twitter Says Goodbye To “Fleets” AKA Twitter Stories
Twitter rolled out “Fleets” a little over one year ago, and they are already discontinuing the Instagram Stories-like feature.
According to Twitter themselves, they designed Fleets as a way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. If you weren’t familiar with the product, which it seems like not enough people were, Fleets appeared above the home timeline and they disappeared after 24 hours.
However, Twitter isn’t seeing an increase in the number of people joining the conversation so Fleets will no longer be available starting August 3rd.
This is just another example of how quickly social media can move. Fleets were initially rolled out in March 2020. As a business owner, it’s important to know about new features, but investing too much into one platform or feature can leave you shorthanded when they fail.
Here are a few things Twitter has to say about their bet on Fleets and what they learned from the unsuccessful release:
- Twitter is exploring more ways to encourage participation on Twitter from people who have anxiety about long-term tweets.
- Some features that users enjoyed from Fleets were media like photos and videos. Twitter is incorporating updates like full-screen camera, text formatting options and GIF stickers into their normal Tweets composer.
- The top of the timeline is still the best place to highlight what’s happening right now.
- Along with Fleets came full-screen, vertical format ads. Those are still being tested and those ads may still be available on Twitter.
As always, we’ll stay up-to-date with all platform changes across Facebook, Twitter, Google and more!
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Twitter Says Goodbye To “Fleets” AKA Twitter Stories was originally published in Social Media For Business Owners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.