Twitter News

In an effort to be a social network that can be a reference for brands and professionals, Twitter creates “Twitter for Professionals.” The objective is to help these types of accounts and improve their social media presence.

If likes help improve reach and interactions for content creators and brands, Twitter advertises “dislikes” so people can better curate their feeds, leave their opinion, or give insight to brands on how to improve their content.

Twitter includes Communities to create a private space and for users to share exclusive content. Similar to private Facebook groups, you can apply to join both public and private communities.

Twitter Circles allow you to create groups of select users who will see your content. It’s similar to Instagram’s “Best Friends” feature so that only those in the group can see your tweets.

Twitter includes the option to add both photos and videos in the same tweet, so you can complement both types. You can also publish tweets with multiple photos and multiple videos with a maximum of four total files.

South African entrepreneur Elon Musk made his Twitter purchase official on October 28, 2022. This would embark on a new generation of the network, which would forever change many of its fundamental features and those that have been added.

One of the first announcements from Elon Musk was the introduction of Twitter Blue, a subscription service for all users that pay the monthly subscription fee. This includes access to exclusive benefits, including account verification.

With the Twitter Blue verification, two badge types appeared, a yellow and a blue one. The yellow corresponds to media and brands, and the blue one is for maintaining authentication for the other accounts.

As part of the Twitter Blue subscription, you have the option to set up a profile picture with your own NFT, only for iOS users. For the moment Android doesn’t have this option.

The rise of Instagram stories has provoked Twitter, which is seeking the same results of “Fleets” which are posts in vertical format that last for 24 hours and appear at the top of the timeline.

Subscription services start to appear on social media and Twitter is investing on the “Tip Jar” feature for users to reward content creators and brands through tips.

Audio spaces came to light with the emergence of ClubHouse, a podcast app for select creators. Twitter took advantage of this momentum to launch Twitter Spaces for all users. 

Following the Tip Jar, Twitter proposed another rewarding method between creators and followers, Superfollows, allowing users to create exclusive content that others can watch through paying for access.

Twitter’s goal is to ultimately keep users on the social network for as long as possible. With this, it adds the ‘Explore’ tab, available in both the app and desktop versions to discover current trends.

After almost 11 years of maintaining 140 characters, the tides turned and Twitter announces the expansion of tweets to 280 characters. This was a major event that would forever change the social network.

Twitter gets rid of the characters that take up mentions within a tweet. Now, only those characters in text format and emojis will count for the character count of your tweet.

Conversations on Twitter enter another dimension thanks to the inclusion of tweet threads, making it easier to create a full story. The user or creator will be able to write a reply to their tweet, creating a large thread of tweets.

Twitter Moments allow creators to group related content into a single link. Threads or multiple tweets on the same topic make it easier for users to access this content.

Twitter announces that multimedia content (photos and videos) will no longer count as characters, permitting users to utilize up to 140 characters of text, as well as being able to include these files.

The duration of native Twitter videos changes from 30 seconds to 140 (2 minutes and 20 seconds). The goal is for users to share video content on the network without including external links on the platform.

Twitter allows you to include emoji stickers in uploaded images to the network. This helps creators personalize their images and interact with their community through stickers.

Twitter allows users and creators to add alternative text to all images included in tweets. ALT text on Twitter helps those visually impaired users to understand the image.

Twitter becomes one of the first social networks to incorporate animated images or GIFs. The social network adds a library of GIFs to include in both tweets and replies.

Live videos land on Twitter, with the option to make a live broadcast through Periscope. Through the API, this application allows you to connect with Twitter and create a live video.

Twitter includes the option to quote tweet, as well as retweet any content from another user that has a public account. Quote tweeting allows you to share the tweet with a message of your own.

In addition to interactions on Twitter to communicate and share content with the community, direct messages or DMs appear for private conversations.

Twitter polls are added as another option for sharing content on the network. These polls allow you to add up to 4 options of 25 characters each, for a maximum of 7 days.

Twitter changes the “FAV” button, as the star button was originally called, for the “Like” button. In its place, a heart-shaped icon appears instead of the star.

Twitter allows all users to see a tweet that starts with a mention. Before, if you didn’t start the @ symbol only those users who followed both your account and the person mentioned would see it. 

Twitter hashtags first appear on the network in 2007. This idea was born by Chris Messina, a marketing specialist, who proposed these hashtags to create groups of related tweets.

In March of 2006, Twitter is born. Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders, shared the message, “Just setting up my twtrr” under its first name before it was changed to Twitter, the infamous name we all know today.