TAMPA, Fla. (WFTS) — Inside BKN Creative, the team is hard at work curating the perfect social media presence for clients.
"We do a lot of engagement, maintaining organic and paid ads, as well as content creation. So anything that you can think of for social media, we do it. We do all of the research behind it, we figured out the whys behind something that didn't perform well, or why something did perform well, and also stay on top of all of the trending content.," said BKN Creative Social Media Manager Ana Reeves Hitzig.
Honing in on a critical but sometimes forgotten business element.
"Social media, it's critical. Honestly, it's the best way for businesses and brands to stay in communication with their clients. And with everybody that follows them, it's typically the first place that people go to have any type of complaints, or praises or questions or anything. So it's really important in terms for businesses everywhere," she added.
But many of their clients are facing a new challenge. Twitter is revamping its verification process in favor of a subscription-based platform.
Here's what's new. Starting April 1, the only users who will have blue checkmarks will be subscribers to Twitter Blue. The subscription service will cost a user between $8 and $11 a month, depending on how they sign up for the service.
There will be other checkmarks available, including a gold check mark for businesses that pay $1,000 a month for the service. There will also be a gray checkmark which means an "account represents a government/multilateral organization or a government/multilateral official."
"It's already impacted our clients and our business with those little things, such as the For You page. It's created a downtick in engagement and reach for some of our clients," she said.
Starting April 15, the service will change the "For You" tab in the app to only highlight Twitter Blue subscribers, meaning paid users.
"So we have a EDI client and it's definitely created more of a trend to go down for them," she said. "A lot of the people that do go with Twitter Blue tend to be on one side of the political spectrum. And so that's one huge concern in the social media industry as a whole is that the For You page is just going to turn into one-sided type of content. And I mean, as a brand, nobody wants to have their tweets go unnoticed."
Many BKN clients see this as a huge obstacle.
"It comes down to you can't really justify it. I mean, for a small business, basically, spending over $1,000 a month is just out of the question. We're helping our clients right now shift to other platforms that will help promote without the big cost," said Social Media Assistant Briaunna Tydlaska.
Tydlaska said right now, what's most important is making sure they help their clients maintain a good social media presence.
"We can't really focus on what to do is a long-term solution. You just got to keep going and deal with the situation as they come," she said.
Aside from businesses possibly losing their verification status and engagement reach, this new model is also ushering in the threat of widespread misinformation. USF Mass Communications Professor Dr. Deborah Bowen said this change scares her.
"What he is going to do to vetted information and legitimized sources is out of control," she said.
Dr. Bowen warned that after tomorrow, we could see more pages impersonating others. A simple uppercase "I" instead of a lowercase "l" could make it easy to be deceived.
"Right now, the Wild West, that is, Twitter, is not allowing us the luxury of being able to quickly look up and vet what is real and what is not," she added.
Verifying social media accounts is a big part of what Dr. Bowen teaches. It's important in the ever-growing world of easy access to information.
"I tell my students. The last place they want to get their information is Tik, Tok, Instagram, and Twitter. It is so important for them to rely on real and legitimate sources that have understandable and discernible biases. So when you are reading your news, you understand, 'Okay? Well, this is from this network. I anticipate it's going to have this bias. This new source is from this network. So I'm awaiting that bias.' I know to take these sources with a grain of salt," she explained.
Dr. Bowen continued, "But if I'm some creator on Tik Tok making a cool video where I am saying fascinating, maybe unprovable things. It's on the Internet, it must be true. People are very easily convinced by good production, values and interesting content and we have to learn that that is not enough."
But with a verified checkmark stamped onto the profile of anyone willing to pay, it could lead to a rise in what people are legitimizing.
"Now we have citizen journalists, citizen creators, citizen propagandists who take it upon themselves to create and disseminate anything from fiction to conspiracy. With the free for all that's going to be the blue check, it's going to become even more challenging to figure out if the source you are looking at has been legitimized in the past," she said.
So how can we shield ourselves from falling victim to misinformation?
"You're gonna have to do your double fact-checking. You're gonna have to fact-check the information and you're gonna have to fact-check the source," she advises.
Dr. Bowen said the other key piece of advice is something you should do sooner rather than later.
"Before these changes start, I would get your follows, your trusted sources right in your account. You should be following them now. Then you'll know if they lose a blue check, they simply didn't want to pay for it."
