My Approach to Twitter: Evolving Social

How many tweets have you sent? Ever?

Not sure? Who even cares, right? Twitter does – it keeps a running tally that it displays on your profile, right under your name (on desktop). Mine used to be over 23,000 tweets sent. That’s not a flex – many, many users have several thousand more. But that’s my point.

I started my Twitter account in 2007. Does anyone really care what someone tweeted about 13 years ago? No. OMG, I hope not! At least not unless someone is trying to uncover anything unseemly or inappropriate in your past.

This unlimited timeline and old content issue is a bit of a problem for social media platforms. Facebook made it’s mission to document your life from birth up to this very moment. That’s over a decade deep for a ton of users. Same with Instagram – do you have thousands of Instagram posts? Probably. But… why?

Instagram has a fix for this social backlog – archiving posts. But most people use that for removing ex-boyfriends or girlfriends, not their entire history. Twitter doesn’t have a solution for this kind of thing, but 3rd party tools are here to help (more on that in a minute).

There's something else driving this idea - The most important evolution in social over the past 10 years was the development of Stories format content (thank you, Snapchat). Stories content represents the exact opposite of the newsfeed backlog. With ephemeral, full-screen portrait content – it is the true mobile experience. Yes, you can archive Stories, but – let’s be honest, they are pretty stale. Sorry, heavily curated feed lovers!

So – why not have a similar approach to Twitter? Of all the major social platforms, Twitter is the most “in the moment” of any of them. What good are your tweets from that conference you attended in 2010 - right up until your tweets while watching the Lakers win the NBA Championship last week? Stale. Dated. Important in the moment, but simply internet debris now. No matter how many Likes they got.

I've implemented a Stories approach for my Twitter content. Here’s how:

I recently deleted over 20,000 of my old tweets. No, not one at a time! Good ol’ TweetDelete to the rescue. It will delete up to 3,600 tweets for free – and a 1 time payment to do them all (Part of that process involves downloading a copy of your Twitter history, a cringe-worthy spreadsheet detailing your prosaic past tweets, so you’ll always have the archive).

TweetDelete also has a great feature that I love – auto-deletion of old tweets. I set mine at 90 days, which is still a pretty decent lifespan for a tweet.

So there you have it – for about $15 USD, I’ve implemented a Stories approach to Twitter. You can too, quite easily. That covers my personal approach… But what about brand social content?

Here’s a space for brands to innovate – and many have. A couple of years ago, Coca-Cola archived all its old Instagram posts. Other brands have done this, too - reset their approach based on a new direction.

Brand social content should be focused on predetermined goals, objectives and returns. Once those campaigns have run their course, clean ‘em up and move on! Social does not have to be a never-ending timeline. Have a look at how Gen Z users operate - their social is focused on the moment, a current reflection.

Social is just the container - brand content should take its own form and shape.

Interested in these ideas? Let me know how it works out for your personal and professional approach for Twitter or Instagram.