This photo illustrates the Twitter Blue Checkmark. It was taken in Warsaw (Poland) on 21 September. … [+]
It was a feeling of hope that I had at the beginning.
Twitter was my first love. After tweeting in a frenetic pace for the first couple of years and continuing to do so often over the next few years, I wanted to know if the new service is worth it. Twitter BlueYou can get a service at $8 per monthly if the upgrade is paid online. This would provide real value.
This service has been controversial since it was once a badge for influential people and those with many followers. It wasn’t so easy to earn that badge before, but now you just have to pay a monthly fee.
I write about social media, but I’ve never paid to acquire followers (or paid anyone to ramp up my follower count). Because I don’t want any special benefits, I use it as an everyday user. Twitter Blue was launched in paid form and became freely available for anyone to use. I wanted to give it a try.
I was familiar with some paid subscription perks. The one that caught my eye was “priority replies” which, in my estimation, means your reply to tweets will post higher in the thread, which is true. It would also mean that more people would follow those who have higher profile replies. I can’t say after my testing that having higher ranking replies helped gain new followers. I can’t say it really changed Everything.
Additional perks include editing tweets and the possibility to post longer videos. The badge offers followers some assurances about whether you are a real person or not (since bots don’t have credit cards…usually). It was okay, and I appreciated that Elon Musk (still at Twitter’s helm) is trying to bring in some revenue through the service.
It reminds me of Truth Social. This service is also of no value, and it’s a way for Trump supporters to share the same content. I’m not sure why anyone would pay for add-ons.
Twitter Blue isn’t really worth it. I didn’t notice any difference at all in terms of new followers or even more interaction. I edited one tweet during my testing period, but it’s just as easy to delete a tweet and start over. Since I’ve been a Twitter user since the beginning, I’ve trained myself to look for typos and make sure my tweets don’t have any problems, so editing tweets is not a big deal.
I also didn’t need to upload any long videos. I’m not sure why I would. If anything, I’d post a link to a YouTube video or something on Vimeo. Twitter Blue should be used as a status symbol to help users find tweets faster in search results. I didn’t notice any difference at all in the number of views on a tweet and even wondered if they went down over the last month. If having my replies rank higher means more people look at my own tweets, that didn’t seem to matter.
There’s something peculiar about signing up for a service that has no value. Twitter has become less valuable to me after I have used it for a few months. You expect to get a return when you give your hard earned cash. It’s like a loyalty program where you gain a few perks here and there but the real goal is to encourage you to buy more stuff. Except that — Twitter Blue doesn’t even reward you with a free cup of coffee. In the end, you feel a bit cheated and think the loyalty program is more of a scam than anything — a way to keep you hooked. Loyalty programs are completely free. It made me wonder if the social media platform has sufficient value to justify paying for additional services.
After a few weeks of testing I believe there is a way to boost revenue. Twitter must offer something that is valuable and worth the price, but I’m not sure exactly what it would be.
I thought Twitter Blue would mean more people would see my tweets, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. More than anything, it’s just a waste of time.
