This week Twitter announced the end to legacy verification marks. Individuals and organisations have until 1 April to sign-up for Twitter Blue, lest they be the April Fool.
This change raises lots of questions for audience and social media teams. Let’s run through what you may want to consider, and some possible solutions.
How to maintain trustworthiness without Twitter verification?
As a news organisation, reputation is vital. You want to be seen as a trustworthy authority on the topics of your reporting. Verification can help achieve this. The question now is can this be maintained without the blue/gold tick.
Self-verification as an alternative
One way to fend off imposters and prove you are who you say you are, is self-verification. A link in your bio or pinned tweet to your website, that in turns links back to your Twitter account, can prove that this account is genuine.
This can also be used by your journalists. Journalists are likely to suffer the most without verification. They lose some perceived credibility. Setting up author-bio pages with self-verification links may help combat this.
Create a public list of your journalists
Another way to assist your journalists is to create a public list of their accounts from the publication’s account. This gives them another tool to prove their association with the organisation. You could then expand to have the official publication’s account interact with your journalists more often.
Consider consolidating accounts
Many publishers have lots of official Twitter accounts for different sections. This makes sense for audience segmentation. Unfortunately it may not be feasible when you have to pay $1000 per month for your initial account and $50 per month for each affiliated account. Consolidating some accounts down may help ease these costs. It also makes it harder for imposters to set up a fake account in your name and spread misinformation.
Is it time to move off Twitter?
Twitter has proved to be unreliable under Elon Musk, and smart audience teams will be paying close attention to their analytics. Moving website traffic sources to owned and operated ventures such as newsletters and podcasts is a good idea. Publishers that use Twitter as their primary output may want to consider transitioning their audience to other platforms. But you shouldn’t go into panic-mode quite yet. Twitter has promised changes in the past months that have not come to past (e.g. to the API) and there are rumours that organisations currently with a gold checkmark, won’t lose them when the changes come into place.