The Twitter Blue Checkmark is seen in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on 21 September, ... [+]
I started out feeling hopeful.
After using Twitter since the early days, tweeting at a frantic pace the first few years and still quite often, I was curious if signing up for the new Twitter Blue service for $8 per month (if you use the web to pay for the upgrade) would offer real value.
The service is controversial because, in the past, Twitter Blue was a badge of honor for influencers and people with a lot of 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). I try to use the service as a normal, everyday user would because I want to experience it without any advantages. Once Twitter Blue launched as a paid service, it became available to anyone, and I decided to try it out.
I had read about some of the paid subscriber 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. That would also imply those higher profile replies would lead to more followers. I can’t say after my testing that having higher ranking replies helped gain new followers. I can’t say it really changed anything.
Other perks include the ability to edit a tweet and 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 seemed okay and I liked that Elon Musk, who is still at the helm of Twitter, is at least trying to generate some revenue with the service.
Unfortunately, it reminds me a bit of Truth Social. That service also offers no discernible value and is just a way for Trump acolytes to reshare the same content with each other. I’m not sure why anyone would pay for add-ons.
Twitter Blue is not really worth the cost. 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 is supposed to be a status symbol and help people find your tweets in searches faster and easier. 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 work as advertised.
There’s something peculiar about signing up for a service that has no value. After using it for about a month, I now view Twitter itself as less valuable. When you hand over cold hard cash, you expect a return on the investment. 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. And, loyalty programs are free. I started wondering if social media has enough value in general to pay for any extra services.
After this last few weeks of testing, I still think there must be a way to increase revenue. There has to be something Twitter can offer that provides value and is worth paying for, although I am now not so sure what that 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.
