Twitter to kill Fleets feature, Facebook competitor Snapchat Stories

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it would end its Fleets feature on August 3.

The announcement means the company will shut down the feature it rolled out last year to compete with the story features available in Snapchat and Instagram. The move comes after the company announced in June that it was starting to test fleet ads, a move that reportedly helped it monetize the posts.

“We were hoping Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter,” the company said. in a blog post. “But, since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets as we had hoped.”

Twitter introduced Fleets in November 2020. The feature allows Twitter users to post fullscreen photos, videos, reactions to tweets, or plain text that disappears after 24 hours. The fleets arrived years after Snapchat and Facebook introduced similar options for their users.

The goal of Fleets was to get more users to post content to Twitter, but rather than encourage new users to post content, Fleets was only used by experienced Twitter users, the company said. .

“Fleets are primarily used by people who are already tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and speak directly with others,” the company said. “We will explore other ways to resolve what is preventing people from participating on Twitter.”

Failure of fleets to spread could be a blow to Twitter’s ambitious goals of having 315 million monetizable daily active users, or mDAU, by the end of 2023 and at least doubling its figure. annual business that year. A key element in achieving these goals was to launch more features that would encourage user growth and greater user engagement.