The Twitter mute Button

Social networking has always been like a multi-lane road, but with the new Twitter mute button, how do you know whether you’re in the fast lane or falling behind?

Most major social media platforms provide options that let users customize their feeds and filter out unwanted content by choosing to ‘hide’ certain posts. Fortunately, these features don’t notify users when they’ve been muted by others, which helps maintain online relationships. With millions of conversations taking place every second on social media, what do these options mean for businesses and individuals?

Twitter

The aim of this new Twitter mute button is to temporarily hide users on your feed so that you can’t see the tweets and retweets of a muted user. However, they are still able to see all your activities. Serving as an alternative to blocking and unfollowing, this is a particularly handy application for consumers to control what they see in their feeds without completely cutting off the relationship with a brand. Users can now tune out companies that avidly live tweet during events, discuss topics that aren’t of interest or post spoilers during live sporting events or TV programs.

For brands however, this new option is more unsettling. Material produced and amplified by businesses through their Twitter account is facing the potential to be eliminated from user feeds as a result of this new button, affecting the accuracy of ratings, impressions and reach of brand viewership numbers. This means that brands need to create a space for the exchange of valuable information by generating quality ideas that cut through all the superfluous information.

Facebook’s ‘unfollow’ button

‘Unfollowing’ (previously known as ‘hiding’) a friend or page on Facebook excludes all their updates from your feed, and is particularly useful for decluttering your homepage. To maintain visibility, brands should therefore only post meaningful and relevant messages to their pages, as ‘spammy,’ over-promoted material can now be easily wiped out and make followers difficult to recover once they’ve silenced your page.

LinkedIn’s ‘hide’ button

The ‘hide’ feature on LinkedIn allows users to eliminate all status updates from a connection without completely removing them from their network. This function can be utilised to block the noise that results from individuals or businesses who link their Twitter account with LinkedIn and regularly posts statuses to only leave the high-quality content.

Tips for brands to avoid being silenced

  • Maintain your identity: Have a defined, consistent identity on all social media profiles.
  • Be yourself: Be authentic and honest in all posts.
  • Use visuals: Posts that incorporate a visual element tend to been seen, liked and shared more frequently than those that only contain text.
  • Have a specific idea you are posting about: Emphasise the main point of the post concisely without being vague.
  • Let your followers know before you have a big tweeting spree: Alerting your followers to the start and end of a live-tweeting period allows them to tune in and out as they wish without having the need to mute you forever.
  • Stay away from anything that seems like spam: Over-promoting a topic and posting too many updates at once clogs up a follower’s activity feed and only encourages them to silence you.

These customisable updates are intended to personalise your social media profiles by clearing out the white noise on your networks and inspiring audience participation. Although they are reversible, brands still need to be aware of the social value of their published messages – once muted, it’s difficult to get users to change their stance.

By Claire O’Dowd and Joanna Yu