DUBAI: Twitter launched Fleets in November 2020 for people to share fleeting thoughts in a format similar to Stories on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, wherein the content would disappear after 24 hours.
In June, the company also announced that it would be testing advertising on Fleets.
However, Twitter on Wednesday announced that it has decided to shut down Fleets, effective Aug. 3, due to the lack of engagement through the ephemeral format.
“In the time since Twitter introduced Fleets to everyone, the platform hasn’t seen an increase in the number of new people tweeting and joining the conversation with Fleets as hoped,” Ilya Brown, Twitter’s head of product, brand and video ads, wrote in a blog post.
Fleets were launched to address the anxiety some people feel when putting out a tweet. However, the company learned that most of the people who used Fleets were the ones already tweeting, and they were merely aiming to further amplify their tweets. Twitter will, therefore, continue to explore ways to address what holds people back from tweeting.
Fleets were launched to address the anxiety some people feel when putting out a tweet. (AFP)
Another lesson was that Fleets were mainly made up of media formats, such as photos and videos, which has encouraged Twitter to start testing updates to the tweet composer and camera to incorporate features from the Fleets composer, such as the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers.
Twitter’s Fleets advertising test, which concluded last month, was one of its first explorations of full-screen, vertical format ads. Although Fleets won’t exist on the platform after next month, Twitter will assess what it can learn from the test and see how these adverts perform.
“We’re evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation. A number of these updates, like Fleets, are speculative and won’t work out,” said Brown.
He added that the platform would be “rigorous” in evaluating what works and when to move on.
“If we’re not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while — we’re not taking big enough chances. We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter,” he said.
