Remember when Twitter made one of the biggest announcements last June about its new option to add audio clips to your tweets?
You can Tweet a Tweet. But now you can Tweet your voice!
Rolling out today on iOS, you can now record and Tweet with audio. pic.twitter.com/jezRmh1dkD
— Twitter (@Twitter) June 17, 2020
It was a magical time as social media gurus started testing the new functionality, celebrities added tweets with their voices and it made a huge hype back then.
This lasted about only five hours, Then, the twitter about audio clips appeared to end very quickly.
The reason behind that is that audio clips do not put a huge functional benefit there, as 90% of people there hate their voice when being recorded.
However, another reason is that the new functionality had some criticism that it doesn’t consider people who cannot hear and that by this, you’re cutting them out of conversations. Then, twitter stated that it did not own a team that focuses on accessibility, and since then they had two teams working on improving the system to make sure that all users are able to engage with tweets.
However, the damage was already done, speaking about the audio tweets, and the hype around the new feature ended so fast. Also, we didn’t hear a lot about it since then.
Until today:
Transcription for audio and video is part of our larger plan to make Twitter accessible for everyone across all features, both existing and new./c9LTPiE003 (2/2)
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 29, 2020
So, the audio tweet option is now available for more iOS users, no Android news until now though. Twitter has also confirmed that it is committed to including automated captions asap for voice tweets considering people who are not able to hear.
So, more people now can access audio tweets, and more users will soon enjoy seeing what people are sharing in their audio clips with the auto caption they are planning to add.
Of course, there is a range of potential opportunities with sound clips in tweets, and it is a shame that Twitter does not have enough vision regarding the accessibility has somehow decreased the excitement for the feature.
However, from social marketing and business point of view, it might be worth thinking about how sound tweets may fit your Twitter approach and give something new and special to your users.
By time, the release of automated captions on audio tweets will make it a lot valuable and accessible option to use.
