Apart from announcing that it is planning to live stream the National Football League’s Thursday Night Football, Twitter also took the opportunity to officially reveal that it is launching a new service that should help enhance user experience, particularly in relation to the use of the social media giant’s Direct Message (DM) feature. Indeed, the company has added a new DM button every tweet on the Android and iOS platforms, which should allow mobile tweeters to initiate private conversations (from public tweets) more conveniently. In other words, users who click this new DM button will be able to share the tweet by way of DM straight from their Twitter Timeline.
The ability to share tweets in private is actually not new. As a matter of fact, Twitter first rolled out this capability almost a couple of years ago, with support for both desktop and mobile platforms. Then, Twitter users were not exactly begging for the feature, but it was a nifty option to have, especially for those who actually needed it.
Fast forwarding to 2016, Twitter obviously feels that the feature now is more useful than ever before. The company does appear to have the raw data to back it up. According to the social media giant, the number of tweets shared in private has increased 200 percent during the final six months of last year. For comparison, that growth rate is better than that of private messages, which rose 60 percent in 2015.
And based on user feedback, a lot of people were actually asking if there was a better and faster way to share tweets. Previously, users can utilize the option by tapping the More button, then selecting the Share via Direct Message option. But now, the button has been incorporated directly on the tweet.
Interestingly, the new DM button is not the only enhancement that Twitter has added to its Direct Messaging feature in the last few months. In fact, the company has launched support for animated GIFs, messaging for groups, customer service tools, and even stopped imposing the 140 character limit for DMs.
No doubt, some are wondering if Twitter has also thought of transforming its DM feature into an entirely separate mobile app (like what Facebook did with its Messenger service). So far, Twitter officially has no plans of doing just that, although there have been reports that it may have been exploring the idea all along.
