Twitter to expand into long-form content with upcoming Twitter Notes feature
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Loading... - Richard Wasswa
- 22 Jun 2022
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In what could be one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters, the company is preparing to launch a new feature that would support the direct publishing of long-form content on its platform. With Twitter Notes, as the upcoming feature is called, users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing.
The feature is being tested with select users ahead of an upcoming public launch, we understand. (Twitter declined to comment but said it would share updates about the feature “soon.”)
If broadly adopted, Twitter Notes could potentially change how some people use the social media platform to share their more in-depth thoughts and ideas.
Today, it’s common for users to create numbered Twitter threads to connect a series of tweets together as a means of storytelling or when explaining any subject that stretches beyond Twitter’s supported character count. As a result of this user activity, Twitter officially embraced threads back in 2017 with the launch of a new Twitter composer screen that made multitweet posts — or tweetstorms as they’re also known — easier to create and publish. At the time, there were hundreds of thousands of threads posted daily, the company had said. That number has likely since grown.
But while Twitter threads encourage engagement as users click to expand the related tweets and replies, they can also be a bit unwieldy to peruse — particularly for longer content. That’s given rise to helpful bots, like Thread Reader App, which turn these tweetstorms into links where the thread’s individual posts are formatted like an article for readability’s sake. These days, you’ll often see users requesting the bot’s help in threads’ replies by tweeting out “@threadreaderapp unroll.”
Beyond threads, users have also worked around Twitter’s character count restrictions by writing long-form content in the Notes app on their smartphone then posting a screenshot of their missive. This works to quickly get a message out to a large audience but doesn’t benefit Twitter as the text in the screenshot isn’t searchable and hashtags aren’t clickable the way text posted natively to the platform would be.
Twitter Notes could potentially offer an alternative to both problems by allowing users to instead write long-form articles directly on Twitter itself. This lets users share their thoughts, as before, while still being able to tap into the potential for viral distribution that comes with posting to the platform. Like tweets, the Notes would have their own link and could be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DM’s, liked and bookmarked. Read More…
