Twitter Blue is Twitter’s paid subscription service that give you the little blue checkmark beside your profile name. According to Twitter, it’s a “premium service with additional features designed to improve user experience and elevate quality conversations on the platform.” As I understand it, Twitter Blue is Twitter’s latest attempt to reduce fake accounts and promote higher quality for it’s users. It is also supposed to offer subscribers fewer ads and a more customized experience.
As a marketer, my primary objective is to figure out if there’s any benefit in subscribing. Does the blue checkmark do anything to help authors?
How Much Does Twitter Blue Cost?
The Twitter Blue subscriptions is fairly reasonable. Here’s the breakdown for the U.S. market as of the time of this article:
As far as I’m concerned, the price still leaves this in the realm of “I’ll consider it, if there are some good marketing benefits for authors.” So let’s take a look at the published benefits that you get with Twitter Blue.
What Do Authors Get With A Twitter Blue Subscription?
Other than the blue checkmark, Twitter Blue offers a number of enhancements to your Twitter account.
Edit Your Tweets: Gives you a 1 hour window to make a limited number of changes to published Tweets – only applies to original Tweets and quote Tweets. This would be nice, but you can always delete and repost.
Half Ads: See 50% fewer ads in the For You and Following timelines. I would personally consider it if there was a NO ADS option.
Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers. This might definitely make the subscription worth it, but I’ve seen no evidence that there’s much of a boost at all.
Longer Tweets: Blue subscribers can Tweet up to 10,000 characters. Is anyone really going to read a 10k article on Twitter?!? That’s just not what the platform is about. It’s supposed to be short and sweet.
Text formatting. You can bold and italicize text in your Tweets. I like this feature.
Bookmark Folders: Lets Twitter Blue subscribers group and organize Bookmarked Tweets into folders. I don’t care about this and it does nothing for author and book marketing.
Custom app icons: You can change how your Twitter App icon displays on your phone. This is stupid.
Custom navigation: Lets you choose what appears in your navigation bar, for quick access to the content and Twitter destinations. You can select at least 2 to 6 items to keep in your bottom navigation. I don’t care about this.
Top Articles: A shortcut to the most-shared articles in your network. Don’t care.
Reader: Turn long threads into a better reading experience. We all get used to reading threads on Twitter. This just isn’t a big deal for me.
Undo Tweet: Gives you the option to retract a Tweet after you send it, but before it’s visible to others on Twitter. Isn’t that what the delete button is for?
Longer video upload: Subscribers can upload videos up to ~2 hours long and up to 8GB file size. No one wants to watch a 2 hour movie on Twitter, at least not yet.
Themes: Lets you choose from colorful options for your app theme. A nothingburger.
NFT Profile Pictures: They are adding NFTs as one of several ways to customize your Twitter profile. I don’t care about this.
SMS two-factor authentication: Subscribers can add another layer of protection to your account with access to two-factor authentication via SMS. If they cared about their users, this would be offered to all their users.
Honestly, I just not seeing anything to entice me to subscribe to Twitter Blue yet. It doesn’t seem like it’s gonna do much for authors or book marketing. I’ve heard some people claim that getting that blue checkmark or verification badge puts you in a different class with your account, but I’m not seeing it.
Is Twitter Blue Worth The Cost for Authors?
I’m just not seeing the value in Twitter Blue for what they’re offering. The whole point of having a Twitter account, as an author, is to promote yourself and your book and to build your brand. There doesn’t seem to be anything special in Twitter Blue to help you do that effectively.
Having said that, I still thought I might be missing something, so I did an impromptu Q&A on Twitter to see if other authors thought it paid off. The answer was a resounding NO.
Obviously, you should make your own decision on this. For me, I’d rather spend that money on some paid advertising or a marketing tool to make my life easier.
