Twitter Engage

Casey Newton, writing for The Verge:

The app, which is available today on iOS, is designed to help famous people interact with their fans and build a bigger following. The app includes three main tabs. Engage highlights the most important interactions you’ve had on Twitter, and includes mentions from users who are verified, followed by a lot of your followers, or interact with you a lot. An “understand” tab shows you high-level analytics for your posts, showing you how many impressions you’re getting over time. And the “posts” tab shows you detailed performance numbers for individual posts.

One thing Engage doesn’t have: a timeline. Engage is for the celebrity who sees the value in tweeting, but would rather not pay attention to the broader conversation in the global town square. If reading Twitter makes you upset, but you still want to be able to broadcast the details of your latest juice cleanse, Engage may be the app for you.

Even with a verified account and a fair number of followers, I find this app almost totally useless. Anything you want to actually do, like respond to a tweet, it shoots you over to the official Twitter app. I fear for Twitter — they’re just spinning their wheels.

Update: I was wrong, you can send new tweets and replies from within Engage. Perhaps my thumb missed the tiny little “reply” button when I tried earlier. But to view details on a tweet or user profile you get switched to the Twitter app. And when you do tweet from Engage, you get this alert as soon as the tweet is sent, every time. What kind of a narcissist wants that? And how did the glaring grammatical error make it into production? It’s an alert you see after every tweet.

★ Tuesday, 21 June 2016