Facebook regularly makes changes to its site, so social media users usually don’t make too much of a fuss when it happens.
However, Twitter has recently rolled out a few interesting updates on its platform, and the reaction has been quite strong.
Some of these features you might find useful, others… not so much.
Tweet Activity
Tweet Activity has been available to some users since earlier this year, but others (including myself) have only recently had the feature enabled on individual tweets. It offers some very useful analytics that can be accessed quickly:
To access it, go to the bottom of your individual tweet and click the little icon of the column graph on the right. You can view more detailed stats on your Twitter Analytics dashboard.
Twitter Polls
In late October, Twitter enabled users to create and tweet their own polls. Unfortunately, the tweeter can only offer two choices/options, and the text for each of these are limited to 20 characters. The nice thing, though, is that who voted and what they voted on is not shared publicly, so users who wish to remain anonymous are more likely to vote.
Facebook used to offer polls but ended up removing the feature; Google+ still offers it but the platform itself is dying out, so the value of polls on Twitter is a little dubious. However, I think it has some great marketing potential, especially for business looking for some quick feedback from their audiences.
Likes replace Favorites
Twitter and its video service, Vine, have introduced a heart icon to replace their star icon (from “favorite” to “like”). This is to make the service less confusing for newcomers, and the logic is that “you might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite”. (Which makes sense, admittedly.)
I’m not a fan of this change—the hearts remind me too much of Pinterest, and I’m sure it reminds others of Instagram. But apparently, in its tests, Twitter found that people “loved” it in their tests; furthermore, a heart is more of a universal symbol than the star.
You can say a lot with a heart. Introducing a new way to show how you feel on Twitter: https://t.co/WKBEmORXNW pic.twitter.com/G4ZGe0rDTP
— Twitter (@twitter) November 3, 2015
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Perhaps next on Twitter’s update list is its 140-character limit?