The other morning I woke up and during my morning check of Twitter I noticed a notification telling me that unless I got Twitter Blue, I would lose two-factor authentication. Since Elon took over Twitter, I’d seen a lot of complaints about it, but I lived in a little cocoon where it didn’t seem to directly affect me too much so I didn’t pay much attention. But here was something that gave me pause for thought. I’ve had my Twitter account hacked before. Twitter was about as helpful as a poke in the eye, and I gathered that would be the case even more under Mr. Musk’s “fire all the staff and save every single penny” strategy. Plus, there are a lot of people on my Twitter whom I speak to online and enjoy engaging with, and I didn’t want to lose the only platform I spoke to them on. So I bit the bullet and paid £11.00 for Twitter Blue for a month to see if it was worth the money.

What are the differences between normal Twitter and Twitter Blue?

When you go to the sign-up page of Twitter Blue you get a nice long list of the “benefits”. One of them is early access to new features like longer Tweets and the ability to edit (but only for 30 minutes after the tweet and not on replies), and the other features barely register as useful. Many of them are just cheap and easy-to-code customization features like changing your theme colour or changing the navigation, and changing the way top news stories are presented to you. Oh, and of course, who can forget the “NFT profile picture” feature, which is surely worth the money? You also get a blue tick, which means nothing if you want it to appear authoritative anyway, as it quite clearly states it is because Twitter Blue has been purchased. 

How much is Twitter Blue?

Twitter Blue is £11.00 per month, and I don’t need to tell you where to navigate to if you do wish to upgrade because believe me, Elon will make sure you know.

Twitter Blue reviewed

As I’ve never deserved a traditional blue tick, I didn’t know how they worked, so I assumed my Twitter handle, which was my blog name, would be so long no one would see it. When I did finally get it verified after about a week, it did indeed show and I thought “oh well, maybe I will get some more Twitter profile views and engagement from people being curious”. 

Here’s where the review starts to get brutally honest (as you know I always am with my reviews), I got LESS engagement after the blue tick. Which I get. I often, before I had Twitter Blue used to look at people and think “haha, you paid for a blue tick”. But that aside, there are still ALL OF THOSE OTHER BENEFITS, right? Let’s start with edit tweet. I’m not too bad at spelling, but when I don’t wear my glasses I won’t catch a mistake at all. I thought this feature would come in handy. Ultimately, you can only edit the tweet for 30 minutes, and you can’t edit replies. I don’t know about you, but if I notice a spelling mistake that quickly, I just delete the tweet and re-do it (my second attempt usually gives me time to think of better phrasing as well). Edit tweet would be useful for tweets you’ve taken time to craft and you notice a couple of hours later, maybe when it starts getting traction, that you have made a mistake.

Being able to write more characters, for me, someone with a chronic case of word vomit seemed like a dream. But do you know what I discovered? I LIKE the challenge of trying to fit what I need to say in 280 characters. The circle still appears in the bottom right-hand corner if you have Twitter Blue, just to tell you only the first part of your tweet would show. I found myself still trying hard to keep within the 280 limit. Twitter is different from Facebook for a reason. The 280-character limit is a defining feature that taught an entire generation to condense stories, facts, and insults down to as little amount of words as they could. It’s a skill.

And what about the other things you can do with Twitter Blue? They didn’t even appeal to me enough to explore. My verdict is, this is a complete waste of money. 

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