LOS ANGELES — Twitter has been the social network that could. It has had its time in the sun where it is the top of the social networks for adult content, and then it will lag behind some new shiny network, then it will come back around. Everyone is always predicting its death, and yet it continues to shine. Twitter is also the “meh, deal with it” network. When people asked to be able to edit tweets, Twitter responded, “Oh, interesting idea, but no.” But they are not totally deaf to the needs of the users. In fact, one potential change could be a big game changer for adult.
A couple of years ago, Twitter changed their search algorithm that hides sensitive content in search unless you click a box to show sensitive content in search in your settings. When this happened phrases like pornocalypse and shadowbanned were bandied around. Though that change was not a pornocalypse, and didn’t overly affect clicks and engagement in the long run for most well run accounts, it has had a negative impact on the discovery of new accounts and has slowed growth for a lot of people.
The other issue that all the social networks have is over saturation. If there are millions of users, and the average user follows a few thousand accounts, how do they ever see all the content? The answer is they don’t. They see a segment of content that was tweeted around the time they logged on. This is why frequent tweeting is important. A couple of tweets a day are simply not likely to be seen. But Twitter may be taking a page out of Instagram’s book.
Twitter may be making the hashtag more powerful! Twitter was the inventor of the hashtag after all, and all the other networks have glommed onto that, with Instagram being the biggest glommer. But Instagram did something right. They made it possible to follow a hashtag. This is a great way to see your interests in your feed and discover new accounts. Twitter has been missing the boat on this user behavior but they may be fixing it.
Twitter has previously put interesting hashtags in the explore tab on their app, which most people don’t use at all. Now they are looking at adding a “dedicated interest experience” which would put topic base tweets — topics meaning hashtags — into your feed. This could be a big boon for adult content on Twitter. People will be able to follow their interests! This would also mean that quality use of hashtags is going to become even more important and showing up as a top tweeter in that hashtag could suddenly be a game changer in terms of new follower discovery, engagement and clicks. Just think, if you were a top tweeter for the term #BBW, and 100k people followed that hashtag, you would be showing up in their feed. How many new followers or clicks would you get if suddenly you expanded your audience by 100k overnight? The potential is very high!
They are talking about not making this 100 percent hashtag-specific and pulling in content based on the text being used in the tweets, but hashtags will still be the number one way to associate yourself with a topic.
The potential benefit to the adult community, with this change, is tremendous and could put Twitter back on top as being the top social network for adult entertainment. Our recommendation — start building your topic ranking now!
Lauren MacEwen is the Chief Strategist of 7 Veils Media, a social marketing solutions company for the adult industry. For those interested in learning how to build up rank on Twitter, or how 7 Veils could help improve your social marketing, visit 7Veils.com, reach out on Twitter @7_Veils or contact lauren@7veils.com.
