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

Based on current trends, and where the social platforms are headed, we’ve made several predictions for 2021, and what social media marketers should be preparing for the next year. The coming year will be a year of growth and development, everything is going to be smooth. Next, we will predict the trends for social media marketing in the coming year based on the top 5 social media platforms. And here comes Twitter:

Twitter

Even after all these years, it’s still difficult to say what Twitter is, what its key strengths are, and how it will grow in the future. Because despite the platform’s ongoing popularity, Twitter is in fact nearly unchanged, with no major innovation or updates that can influence how people use the app.

In fact, Twitter did make changes for its app. It made tweets longer back in 2018, and it has tried out live-streaming and Moments and audio tweets, among various other options. But none of them have really become popular, and Twitter, for the most part, remains what it was at its beginning - a real-time stream of short, fast updates, being the best choice to master the latest information. Apart from those mentioned, there were nothing else worth mentioning.

So, what can Twitter do to overcome the dilemma? It’s safe to say that we will not see any major changes over the next 12 months.

Fleets Updates

At present, Twitter’s version of Stories – ‘Fleets’ - is now open to all users, and the new social style is becoming more and more popular among the users. And Twitter is also willing to test its potential. As a result, you can expect some updates over the next year.

It’s an obvious shortcoming that Fleets has no AR options and effects, and it seems likely that Twitter will add various tools on these fronts, assisted by its acquisition of Chroma Labs back in February.

But it seems that all of those improvements are too late - people have already got used to the effects and visual tools on Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, and it would be unlikely for Twitter to surpass those and make Fleets a bigger consideration in this respect.

Twitter will keep Fleets, and some people will use it, but it’s not going to become a core element to improve user experience and engagement, or to arouse people’s interests.

Audio Spaces

Twitter is also working on Audio Spaces, which will be a Clubhouse-like, audio meet-up feature, giving users another way to interact. 

Like audio tweets, the new function is interesting, but it’s unlikely to become a transformative feature in the app. Audio Spaces is with low expectations, as it still has a considerable quantity of limits. And judging from its recent development, the function will be put online in early 2021.