I love Twitter. I have loved Twitter since I join the platform on March 2011. I do not believe Twitter is dying, they have a few strides to make up in comparison to the other social media platforms, but in now way do I see Twitter leaving the game.
This past week they announced a new change to how users can receive notifications as well as adding a quality control option for tweets.
Check out the GIF below with what Twitter is doing:
Two simple settings to give you better control over your Twitter experience. https://t.co/pEJuMUhCYs pic.twitter.com/jmFd0rDoV6
— Support (@Support) August 18, 2016
Their goal is to give users better control over their accounts.
Let’s look at the Pros and Cons of both of these changes.
Notifications
Twitter said this about notifications on their blog site,
“Starting today, everyone will have the ability to limit notifications to only people they follow on mobile and on twitter.com. Simply turn it on if you want to give it a go. If not, no worries – your individual Twitter experience will continue unchanged.”
Pro: The ability to see only those you follow engaging with you. There are times I have people favorite, retweet or even mention me that are questionable accounts, trolls or just bots. I now have the option to set my notifications to not see those interactions and only the interactions from those I am following. By implementing this setting we do limit the negativity and trolls. We limit people attacking us for no apparent reason. This notification limit does not remove those abusive tweets, but can limit our ability to see them from those we do not already follow.
Con: We limit those with whom we are not already associated with on Twitter. That is the point of this change in the notification setting. The downside to this is we make our Twitter experience more insular, which for some individuals, churches and organizations this might not be the best option to take. Yes the ability to turn on this feature does limit those unwanted interactions, however it limits those we do not follow from communicating with us, with us knowing about it. Some of the greatest interactions I have had on Twitter have come from people I do not follow. They saw a tweet from me and made some form of interaction that I knew about because I was notified. From a church and organizational perspective it is important that we continue to engage with people, whether we follow them or not.
Quality Filter
About their new quality filter Twitter said on their blog,
“When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.”
Pro: The quality filter will help with all those automated tweets, and tweets that are duplicate tweets. Now this filter does not mean that 3rd party sites like Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, etc will be filtered out. What it does mean is those tweets that are spam, duplicate or have similar language will be filtered. I have encountered any number of tweets that are automated content and not any different than the tweet earlier in the day. I believe the goal with this is to provide quality content, and content that will garner engagement and interaction with accounts, rather than just having information pushed through.
Con: The biggest downside is for those who do a lot of automation with their tweets. With this filter on their approach will have to change. Duplicate tweets will be filtered. Automated tweets will be filtered. Low-quality content will be filtered. Again, it is not the 3rd party management system, it is the content of the tweet that Twitter is concerned about. Twitter is about connecting people and engaging with others. Therefore, what this filter means for churches and organizations is that their content will need to be more than announcements and links to the newsletter.
I am excited for the upcoming changes. I will more than likely test both options to see what the difference is and if it does in fact change my experience, but as of right now I have to wait until the roll-out hits my account.
What do you see as the pros and cons?
Will you turn on the notification setting and quality filter?
Maybe one or the other?
I would love to have some more conversation about this.
Jeremy Smith says
I think this could be a game changer if adopted, but people use Twitter because they don’t like Facebook’s newsfeed so I don’t see that part of the audience using it. But maybe the fear of your content not getting shared will have some churches do better on social media. Maybe.
Paul says
My biggest concern is that this is just the first step and Twitter will eventually follow Facebook’s lead – only give access to the filtered feed and then charge us to “boost” tweets that we want people to see. As much as people complained about this when FB did it, most people stuck with FB and they are making billions while Twitter is still losing money.
Eric Dye says
True story. Considering Twitter has such a problem turning a profit, I could see this happening.