2021 Social Media Prediction: Twitter—Improving User Experience from Details (II)

Topic Focus

Twitter is trying to expand its potential for engagement by providing users with more recommendations of Topics.

In 2021, we will likely see Twitter take this a step further and enlarge Topic spaces. Specifically, Twitter’s team will collect relevant tweets on a topic, and compile them into a dedicated page or section.

This adjustment is similar to its current listings related to in-progress sporting events and live-streams, providing a more immersive, focused listing of key tweets and profiles on each topic, which could help to improve engagement. 

Status Indicators on Profiles

Twitter has been testing this function for a while, and it is in line with the roll-out of Fleets, which seem to be a reasonable addition.

Still, it’s not a major element to the app, but it could provide more opportunity for user connection and engagement, especially when it comes to major events. Users will see this function in the first half of next year.

Verification Categories

In November, Twitter announced that it’s working on new categories of user verification, based on the present blue tick. That could see new types of verified accounts, which could include specific indicators based on what each represents.

A new identifier for bot accounts is the highlight for the adjustment. In October last year, Twitter has mentioned that it was working on a possible identifier for bot profiles, so as to let users know who (or what) they are dealing with.

That will be a big change, which could influence user engagement in the app. And if Twitter wanted to take a further step, it will probably do as follow:

Bot Crackdown

Bots is always a major problem on Twitter, as many political groups use bot ‘armies’ to manipulate engagement and sway opinion.

But what if, Twitter established a threshold on what qualifies as a bot account, and said, “if 80% of your tweets are retweets, you’ll be labeled as a bot profile’. That would annoy a lot of users. But it might also get more users sharing more of their own thoughts, instead of simply amplifying existing comments. That will meet with Twitter’s recent intent to get users to take more time to consider what they’re sharing, instead of straight retweets.

Although there is no indicator that Twitter will do anything like this, but if the platform intents to solve the problem of bots, that will be what they need to consider.