Welcome to Edition No. 11 of my weekly digital strategy newsletter, providing practical analysis of the latest in the world of content creation.
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Contents
I. News: Elon Musk Owns Nearly 10% of Twitter
II. Analysis: Editing Tweets is a Bad Idea
III. Tip: LinkedIn’s Creator Mode
News
IT ‘MUSK’ BE LOVE
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla with a net worth of more than $300 billion, bought nearly a 10 percent stake in Twitter last Friday. On Tuesday morning, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced Musk has been appointed to its board.
Musk has already promised “significant improvements in the coming months” and polled users about whether they want an edit button. (This is a bad idea, as I’ll explain in this week’s Analysis.) Surely intentionally, he misspelled the two answers as “yse” and “on”.
Nearly 74 percent of the more-than 4.4 million respondents voted yes. I mean, yse.
The board appointment includes an agreement that his ownership cannot reach 15 percent of the company, which is a protection against a takeover bid. And perhaps unpopular ideas – like reinstating Donald Trump to the platform – depending on whom you ask.
AUTOCOMPLETE IN SEARCH ON GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4
The search box at the top of Analytics now provides suggestions to help you find information. Analytics shows useful queries as you type, bolding the suggested portion of the text.
This is a nice update that functions similarly to autocomplete on Google search.
The benefit is that it can help you more quickly find reports you seek, as well as expose you to new ones you may not have known existed.
UPDATES & TESTS
Update: In-stream video ads are no longer a placement option. The alternative? Instagram Reels placements.
If you don’t run Instagram ads or understand what this means, exactly, here is the takeaway: Meta is pushing Instagram users more and more toward Reels – its TikTok copy – and further and further from its other products.
Test: The ability to “un-mention” yourself on others’ tweets. (Your user name would still show up, but it would be grayed out.)
This would be a good way to clean up your replies when you don’t want to get notifications about a conversation you care nothing about.
Analysis
We Should Not Be Allowed To Edit Tweets
Twitter posted this Friday, April 1, and for the date, many took it to be a joke:
It turns out, however, that this is about as much of a joke as Elon Musk joining the company’s board, which is to say, it’s not a joke at all.
And that’s a problem.
According to an unscientific poll from Musk (see news above) I’m in the minority. But I’m here to defend that stance.
The year is 2024. Someone you follow tweets the following:
“The V60 is the best way to make coffee at home. If you don’t agree, you can unfollow!”
Moved by this highly logical statement, you quote tweet it with the text “Couldn’t agree more!”
A week later, you notice something strange: you have lost hundreds of Twitter followers, and even have a few nasty replies in your notifications telling you how bad your taste in coffee is, and that you’re a #planethater.
Confused, you go to your profile and scroll through your tweets to find the coffee opinion you amplified days earlier. You’re horrified to find that the original tweet, accompanied by your “Couldn’t agree more!” proclamation now reads: “The Keurig machine is the best way to make coffee at home. (And I like to bury my used pods in the backyard.) If you don’t agree, you can unfollow!”
You delete your quote tweet, but the damage is done. Hundreds of followers lost. Your reputation – environmentally as well as in the world of coffee – utterly destroyed.
That is just one of the ways a tweet editing feature could go awry.
So with the apparent inevitability of the tweet-edit button’s release, we should at least have some guardrails in place. Here, then, are my suggestions.
Two-minute limit
This is like GMail’s “undo send” feature, though much more generous. It’s more than enough time to realize an error you made – or for someone else to realize it and notify you – and make the change.
Anything more, and your tweet has flown the coop, so to speak, and changing it now would just create confusion and/or deception.
Character limit: You can change up to five characters
Isn’t this the main reason people with genuinely good intentions want to edit a tweet? Instead of saying your favorite football player is Messi, you wrote Messy, and you need to correct this error as soon as possible.
This may seem strict, but I have preemptively answered a couple objections I would expect to receive:
What if I want to update my tweet with new information? Reply to your previous tweet with a new one, thus creating a string of connected tweets, just like the old days. Er, the right-now days.
What if I really messed up and what I tweeted in the original tweet was inaccurate? In this case, the world is probably better off without your original tweet. Delete it, and in the spirit of transparency, tweet an update saying why you deleted the original, while sharing new, accurate information.
Others Get Notified*
*If they have interacted with your tweet.
That means anyone who has retweeted, liked, quoted or replied to the original tweet should get a notification along the lines of: “@someoneyoufollow is human just like you, and they made a mistake. (Or maybe not.) Either way, they edited their tweet, and since you interacted with said tweet, we thought you would like you to know in case their changes have put your professional reputation at stake.”
“Edited” tag on the tweet
This is a no-brainer, but anytime a tweet is edited, it should permanently be tagged “edited” in a noticeable way. Even if the user changes it back to exactly match their original tweet, since that would in fact be double-editing and probably deserves even more attention.
At the moment, it will only be available to Twitter Blue (a paid service) members. So the potential chaos will be contained, at first.
What are some other reasons we shouldn’t be allowed to edit tweets? Let me know below in the comments.
(If you think you have a good reason why we should be able to edit tweets, I cordially invite you to take a walk outside and get some fresh air.)
Weekly Tip
LinkedIn’s Creator Mode
Last week I promised a link to a blog post about how to create events in Google Analytics 4. But that was before I decided to switch the CMS on my website, which means I didn’t have time to finish the post in the detailed manner that I would like before sharing a snippet here.
Instead, I want to call your attention to “Creator Mode” on LinkedIn. Among other benefits, there are two in particular that I like:
When people come to your profile, the first option they’ll see is to “Follow” you, not connect with you. Same thing if you come up in their search results. I think this is a great way to make it easier for others to connect with you – and increase your following – without actually connecting with you (which they can still do by clicking the “More” dropdown on your profile).
You can add up to five hashtags to your profile.
I bet you’re rolling your eyes at number two. Hashtags. What is this – 2011? I get it, but hear me out. First, they help with search visibility. And second, they give people an idea what they can expect from you if they want to connect.
(LinkedIn is about more than job-hunting these days, people! And no, this is not a sponsored tip. For the record, I would gladly take money from Microsoft to do sponsored tips.)
To turn on Creator Mode, go to your profile page and click on Resources. From there you can activate creator mode and add the hashtags relevant to your profile.
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