Full-Screen, Visual Tweet Reactions Are Now Available On Twitter’s Live Test

With the debut of a live test on iOS, Twitter is taking the next step with its full-screen, video reply option, allowing users to choose 'Quote Tweet with the reaction' to build and customize a unique Tweet take.

As you can see in this sample flow, users will be able to respond to a tweet with a full-screen video or image, with the original tweet included in the graphic. The option, which was first noticed in testing last month, basically repurposes the core pieces from Fleets, the company's unsuccessful Stories clone, into the standard tweet experience.

In a similar vein, Twitter is now exploring an upgraded text editor option for tweets, which would allow you to give your comments more color and presence. With TikTok increasingly popularizing the full-screen, visual feed approach that many platforms are eager to imitate for their purposes, more emphasis is placed on visual, engaging answers, which better match with evolving user behaviors. With Twitter now displaying images in full-size in feeds, these new features could be a great way to increase engagement and interaction, as well as shift tweet users' behaviors toward more creative, colorful sharing.

The wider visual style is also in line with Twitter's revised Explore layout, which allows users to scroll vertically across full-screen messages to keep up with the newest news. Again, TikTok's influence is evident, and with the app on course to achieve 1.5 billion users by 2022 — more than 7 times Twitter's present audience – that strategy makes sense.

Sure, it seems out of place, and Twitter users weren't interested in Fleets, so why should they be interested in this? Although there are legitimate concerns about the test, it might also be a smart approach to foster new types of tweet interaction and maintain more of that engagement on Twitter itself, rather than people re-sharing tweets on other platforms and reacting to them there.

Twitter, in particular, needs to attempt new things. While incoming CEO Parag Agrawal will have his ideas about how to enhance growth and bring in more users, he has emphasized that he is dedicated to fulfilling the company's previously announced targets under Jack Dorsey, which include a significant increase in revenue during the same period. That'll be a tall order, especially given the fact that Twitter's user base has only grown by 12 million in the last year. To meet its objectives, it will need to more than triple its current growth rate, which means it will likely do more fresh experiments like these to determine what, if anything, sticks.

And this one makes more sense than, for instance, Fleets, which were an add-on to the standard tweeting experience. The issue with Fleets was that it diverted attention away from the primary, real-time stream; perhaps adding the same capabilities into the normal procedure can improve its appeal. Maybe. Time will tell, but these new full-screen tweet responses should start appearing on your timeline shortly.