Twitter Unleashes ‘Fleets’ : A Breakdown of the Platform Feature

Another, and perhaps the last major social media platform to roll out the “stories” feature. However, rather than calling it “stories” — Twitter is following their brand icon of the bird and calling this feature “Fleets.” Though the feature performs fairly similarly to other platform stories, Twitter makes it their own by giving it the bird-related title.

This morning I was playing around with the feature because I wanted to see if there were any major differences between Fleets and other story platforms (I’ve mainly used Instagram stories). There are three major key differences that sets Fleets apart from other platform stories.

(1) Twitter Reclaims Their Content

First, users can share tweets on their fleets and it will disappear after 24 hours. This has been a common practice of users on Instagram — where they would share posts with tweets. However, those posts will only hyperlink to the original Instagram page, and there would be no way to hyperlink an Instagram post directly to a tweet on Twitter’s native application. Twitter reclaims their original content that has been shared across Instagram as original UGC.

(2) Hands Free Video

Second, the video feature on the fleets is hands free. There will be no more fear of having gripping your phone with every ounce of metacarpal thumb strength. On Instagram, you are allowed to change the video feature to hands free; however, Twitter sets this as the primary option. This can allow for more flexibility of real-time filming of content for Fleets.

(3) Alt-Text Inclusion

Third, Twitter is allowing users to provide up to 1000 characters of alt-text when posting photos either through your camera roll or through the camera feature. Anybody who works in web development and SEO knows how valuable alt text is. This is used for site optimization, and more importantly (and holistically) for accessibility of content for those who are blind or low-vision.

After quick research I found that Twitter did roll out this alt-text option on any photo tweets earlier this year. Twitter is a major source for memes and UGC. Alt-text descriptions on the platform allows images to become more searchable, offers inclusion and accessibility to a wider audience, provides additional API endpoints for developers, and pushes Twitter’s interface to become its own version of a search engine.

LinkedIn: Brianna Lytle