Twitter has this week announced a new version of its TweetDeck tool to help mitigate some of the issues it’s been experiencing lately. However, users will need to be sure they hold a verified account as the latest update is for those with blue ticks only.
TweetDeck is a popular – and previously free – tool that gives users the ability to organize and monitor content from the accounts they follow. It’s historically been favored by social media managers, brands and news organizations.
The annoucement comes alongside recent reports that Meta are planning their own Twitter rival, Instagram Threads. This latest update under Elon Musk’s leadership could well be the final nail in the coffin for Twitter users on a free account, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the platform’s changes.
TweetDeck 2.0 Has Been in the Works for Almost 2 Years
It appears that Twitter has been testing a new version of TweetDeck for a while now. For those paying the $84 a year for their Twitter Blue subscription, the updated version can be accessed by selecting ‘Try the new TweetDeck’ in the platform’s menu.
From there, users can carry over their lists, columns, saved searches and workflows. However, the ability to do this is a one-time option only and if it’s not undertaken, users will have to rebuild everything manually.
New features to the platform include full Tweet composer functionality and video docking. The feature Teams, which allows users to share Twitter account access without the need to share passwords, won’t be available off the bat though. This is “temporarily unavailable” with aims for it to be restored in the next few weeks.
Users will be forced to make the switch in 30 days (before the first week of August) and for those on the fence about paying for verification, they can undertake a free 30-day trial.
Users Don't Seem To Be Thrilled
It’s safe to say Twitter Blue hasn’t gone down a storm as a whole, and with TweetDeck being the victim of breakages recently (with notifications and columns failing to load), this latest update looks like it could cause more upset than interest.
The recent platform inaccessibility is said to have been caused by Musk’s limitations on the number of tweets a user can read in one day – 1,000 for unverified users and 10,000 for verified users. He said this was to prevent data scraping and “system manipulation” by accounts looking to train AI models.
According to Musk, this “temporary emergency measure” was to combat any negative effects to the user experience. However, users – both free and paid – shared reports of quickly hitting rate limits, impacting their experience anyway.
What's Next on the Horizon for Twitter?
In order to conduct damage control, there are a few things which are likely high on Musk and new CEO Lina Yaccarino’s to-do list.
Before Yaccarino can realize her transformation mission to make Twitter the “global town square for communication”, she first needs to work on winning back advertisers to the platform.
In 2021, advertising accounted for over 90% of Twitter’s $5.1bn revenue. From March this year however, it’s expected turnover fell to less than $3bn, highlighting the repercussions of a mass exodus of advertisers.
Subscriber numbers have similarly dwindled, with just 150,000 users out of a global user base of nearly 400 million signing up to the Twitter Blue service. This has since fallen to around 68,000. It’s likely then that this latest Twitter Blue-exclusive feature will further alienate and frustrate users.
