Namaste, Fleets! Twitter introduces a new way to have conversations, it is testing out a new way to have conversations about your fleeting thoughts on the service – Fleets. Fleets are for people to share their ideas and momentary thoughts. These posts disappear after 24 hours and have no Retweets, likes or public comments. Twitter feels that this empowers people to express themselves. India is the third market globally after Brazil and Italy where Twitter is rolling out this feature to test.
Medianews4u spoke to Digital experts on their views and thoughts on this new feature ‘Fleet’ by Twitter.
Shradha Agarwal Co-founder & COO, Grapes Digital
Twitter is a platform used for opinions and arguments and that’s one of the main reasons we see news channels and opinion leaders in the frontline. Unlike Instagram, where we have more aspirational content. Keeping a Digital Marketing perspective in mind, it is a new feature that every brand will absorb in three steps:
- Announcement – Will be an integral part of their moment marketing strategy
- Campaign – Creating an engagement campaign only using Twitter fleets
- Social Strategy – Making this format a part of the overall Twitter strategy.
From an Influencer perspective, this will become a platform to announce their Unfiltered and Behind the scene thoughts. The former cannot go viral quickly and the latter becomes additional content to add value, like Insta stories.
Shrenik Gandhi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, White Rivers Media
I think that Twitter Fleets is a good to have feature, definitely not something different from the other 24 hours story features that the social networking apps across the industry have tried. Some succeeded at it while a few failed too.
This definitely won’t have a very strong impact on the industry and neither is it going to bring about any sort of drastic change/scope to the campaigns or brands. You could sum it as a plus one feature launched by a social media giant that will be used by the brands and companies in the times to come.
Karthik Sreenivasan, Media & Communication Consultant
Twitter has launched fleets and LinkedIn is considering Stories too, like Instagram. I’m personally not a fan of vanishing, ephemeral content because I believe this is engineered FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). That is FOMO manipulated by the social media platforms only to make us spend more time on them.
We are increasingly moving away from appointment-based content to on-demand content. Examples of appointment-based content would be newspapers (that you set a time to read in your day) or satellite TV (that you need to remember to tune in). But the internet has been obliterating appointment-based content and moving us towards on-demand content, in the form of news anytime (on the mobile) and OTT (that allows us to watch what we want, at a time of our choosing).
Stories or Fleets go against this trend by creating an artificial deadline for the content’s existence thereby forcing us to spend more time catching up. This obviously helps the platforms to increase the time spent on them, which is in turn highly monetizable.
Ambika Sharma, Founder, and MD, Pulp Strategy.
Fleets could have waited, at least to create an exciting feature. Fleets have not made a dent beyond novelty, there is an immediate comparison with Snapchat and Instagram which provide flexible and far richer experiences.
Siddharth Devnani, Co-founder & Partner at SoCheers
”We see how Instagram stories get higher views and impressions as compared to posts on the rest of the app. Advertisers and brands realized this very early on and strategized for stories separately. Our learning is that posts with a limited lifespan, like IG stories and fleets, drive much higher FOMO – and hence higher engagement. For Fleet, like any new feature launched by a social media platform, there are mixed emotions along with some entertaining tips – go check out #FleetFeedback. As for brands, many will invariably repost content meant for elsewhere, but most will wait and watch what impact it can drive. The user behavior and adoption will dictate how much brands focus on it and how much advertisers spend on it in the near future. I am looking forward to some smart creators and some select brands having a lot of fun with Fleet, while it’s still a fresh new feature!”
Mehul Gupta, CEO & Co-founder at SoCheers
Twitter fleets will help content to be discovered quicker. Also we will now see images and videos be equally important on the platform which was always text first. This update has given room for creative content to be created on the platform which will be smartly used by the creators, influencers & brands. However, the impact of this is yet to be discovered. We can expect a few more updates in coming weeks by the twitter team basis their learnings.
