Is It Time to Come Back to Twitter?

With the recent changes to Facebook's feed, other Social Media platforms have seen some variation in their increasing user base and usage time. One of the biggest winners of this Social Media change is none other than Twitter.

This past year, Twitter announced several feature updates that are aimed to improve content relevance. This will be done through including mobile push notifications and the "while you were gone" tweets to resurface highly engaging content. This will increase discoverability and exposure for publisher videos.

Twitter has also introduced view counts for videos. This is important because these new features appeal to publishers and Social Media figures. With higher engagement of these accounts, the more posts to Twitter's platform, and with more posts, the higher rate of engagement with daily users. This increasing cycle is shown to be the case for Twitter with Facebook accounts transitioning and adding their content to Twitter because of the declining Facebook traffic to news publishers.

As Niall McGarry, founder of Joe Media, has said,

"Whether content does well on Facebook is in the lap of the gods. The algorithm is much more complex. . . Twitter has a consistency that Facebook doesn't."

Across its top brands, magazine publisher Bauer has noted that Twitter video views have increased by five times from October 2017 to December 2017. Other sources such as CNBC International and lifestyle publisher Stylist saw an increase as well. Other sources claim to have increased views as well, but no specific numbers were released.

It is likely that these are all related, and one of the biggest reasons for this is Twitter's Amplify program. With this new program, Twitter's payouts to publishers has grown 60 percent since last year. Amplify was launched five years ago to help and encourage publishers to make money from selling pre-roll ads around their Twitter content.

As Garrett Goodman, VP of business development at social video platform Wochit, noted,

One of the advantages [with Amplify] is that publishers are often getting an extra paycheck with minimal extra effort . . . They're just posting the same videos they're already making for Facebook, but this time actually monetizing the views, so there's virtually no downside here.

With all of above mentioned, Twitter does have its own issues still apparent. The Social Media platform still does not match Facebook as a referral source. Also, the platform can be a toxic and uncomfortable environment because of trolling and hate speech. Twitter has made notions to fix this, such as removing verification from accounts that are tied to being hate speech and engaging of violence towards certain demographics.

While this is the case now, we might see a more evening playing field for Social Media platforms as Twitter account videos are reporting to performing better at an increasing rate than said videos on Facebook.

Who knows, you might just go to Facebook for family and friends, and go to Twitter for news and viral videos. It is also interesting to note the potential that other Social Media platforms have in these recent changes as well.