Twitter experiments with suggesting videos to include when composing your tweet
Twitter Experiments With a New Video-Sharing Feature — So it doesn't look like Twitter is going to get into the audio business, after all. But Twitter has liked video for quite a while.
Context & Ripple Effects
The experiment extends a push that began in earnest with Twitter's new video hosting platform in March 2014, which let mobile users play clips with a single tap; suggesting videos at compose time closes the loop from passive playback to active sharing.
The timing matters against two threads from mid-May: reports — unconfirmed — that Twitter was weighing an acquisition of music and audio-sharing service SoundCloud to help address its growth problem, and the company's own signal that it will not move into the audio business after all. With shares under pressure since the post-lockup selloff earlier in May, video is where Twitter's product energy is visibly going instead.
First-order effects
- Tweet composers see suggested video clips inline, cutting the friction of hunting down a clip elsewhere before attaching it — every tweet becomes easier to make richer.
Second-order effects
- More native video inside tweets shifts attention away from off-Twitter players like YouTube embeds, and gives advertisers a larger pool of video-adjacent impressions within the timeline.
Third-order effects
- If suggestion-at-compose sticks alongside the single-tap playback work, Twitter's identity drifts from a text-first network toward one where media is the default unit of posting — with the company's experiment cadence, not any single feature launch, doing the steering.
The trend: Social platforms are moving media creation upstream into the composer itself, using suggestions rather than uploads to raise the share of posts that carry video.