Check-mate: Feeling blue over Twitter’s latest move

Twitter used to be one of my favourite places. 15 years ago, as an exiled Sheffield Wednesday fan down south, I loved being able to connect with fellow supporters. My circle widened on there, I met loads of new people, some who became friends in real life and some I even went on to work with. I remember spending great evenings on there watching events like the Brit Awards together and sharing jokes – remember the one where Madonna's cape got caught and she fell backwards?

In recent times I have used it less, during the pandemic, Instagram seemed to be a more wholesome place with fewer ridiculous conspiracy theories – or maybe that was just that I was following a different crowd on there. But I still saw a value in Twitter, especially for my clients in big brands who could have a more direct relationship with their consumers or Pro-Talent who could get involved in any conversations that they wanted to.

The Sports and Entertainment teams in Twitter UK were always a pleasure to work with, and they helped me a lot with various clients over the years. But then Musk came in and the team pretty much disappeared overnight. I was left to battle with the help forms if a client was hacked or couldn’t get into their account anymore with no humans to chat to. It was clear that Twitter were no longer seeing this group of talent as important – which is a shame as without their content and the attraction of their fans, Twitter would never have grown to the size it is today. I don’t deny that a lot of the appeal of Twitter is that you don’t have to be famous to say your piece, share your work and engage with other people, it is a diverse community. But in the early days it was people like Ashton Kutcher who raised awareness of what it was and how it worked.

Which brings us to yesterday. I only realised that Twitter was removing all legacy blue ticks when clients started messaging me, asking me to get them back for them. For me, the blue tick has always been an important way to protect a client. To show that this is really them and to give reassurance to people searching for them. I have always been against agencies and PR companies charging people to get a blue tick and have always helped talent to get theirs for free as I believe if they are in the public eye and of public interest, they are entitled to that tick.

It's not a status symbol, it is an essential tool to keep people safe online. Or at least it was… Now anyone can get a blue tick by subscribing to Twitter Blue for ￡11 a month. For me that makes it lose all value and significance. All it verifies now is that someone is paying - you get verified by proving that a phone number exists. But that is no proof that the phone number belongs to the person who has their name on the account. To get the official blue ticks I had to prove that the person was who they said they were AND that they were of public interest by sharing national level news coverage over a sustained period of time. Sometimes that made it hard to get ticks for up and coming comedians or sports people but I respected the rigour of the process. ?

I will not be advising any of my clients to pay for Twitter blue. Most of them have other elements in their favour that will show they are who they say they are.

One of the attractions for hackers used to be getting a blue ticked account that they could sell on, I am not sure whether the removal of legacy ticks will make them less likely to be hacked or whether their follower counts will still have an appeal. But I will be monitoring everything closely.

The biggest issue on Twitter is the way tweets show in the feed. Obviously if you look at someone’s profile, there will be ways that you can assess whether it is the true account (see below) but when you look at a tweet in a feed it’s easy to not spot a lowercase L instead of a capital i etc. And then with the ease that posts can be retweeted, you can end up with misinformation spreading like wildfire.

I have a few bits of advice:

My advice to Pro-Talent

• Make sure you have two factor authentication on your account. Twitter have also removed being able to do this through SMS for free so I would use an authenticator app like Authy
• If you have a smaller following or newer account, you could pin a tweet to your profile with a video of you saying your @handle so that people can be sure it’s you
• Use more video in your posts – it does well anyway and is obviously you

My advice to followers

If you’re unsure if it is a legitimate account, look at the following things

• Number of followers
• Ratio of followers to how many people they are following
• Interactions they have with other talent accounts

From the chats I have had so far, I am not seeing Talent planning to leave the platform yet but I guess it will depend what happens over the coming weeks.

If you want to chat about your social media strategy please get intouch.