X Blue, is it worth it?
We take a deep dive into X Blue (previously Twitter Blue) and see if it is worth the monthly fee for companies and organisations. We explore the best features and benefits included and how these can be used to improve a company profile’s presence to let you know if X Blue is worth it.
What is X Blue?
X Blue is an opt-in, paid monthly subscription that adds a blue checkmark to your account and offers early access to select new features. It is a service available to any profile and not just limited to companies, but is useful to businesses and organisations.
Features & Benefits
In addition to the blue checkmark beside your company name, X Blue offer subscribers a way to enhance and customise their experience on X (formerly Twitter). These benefits are a mixture of tools specifically held back for subscribers and some features which are in testing/preview and are yet to reach the full X membership.
The feature list has expanded since Blue first launched and now provides a solid foundation to stand out on X, compared to accounts that are not signed up to the paid plan. A summary of the features currently listed on their website that would be of most benefit to businesses looking to improve their social media marketing are as follows:
-
Edit Post
Noticed a typo in the post just after its published? No problem. With Edit Post, you can tweak the copy without needing to delete and re-post from scratch. Saves time and embarrassing typos. This highly requested feature gives you a 1-hour window to make a limited number of changes to published posts. Use it to make updates, tag someone, or reorder the media you attached.
-
Prioritised rankings in conversations and search
Other company or individual posts that you have replied to from the company account will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. X Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers. This means in posts that receive a lot of interaction, your reply will have a greater chance of appearing near the top – and thus likely to lead to higher engagement and profile clicks, etc.
-
Longer Tweets
Longer posts allows X subscribers to submit a post up to 25,000 characters long. The limit for non-blue accounts is 280. Standard functionality like posting media, creating polls, and using hashtags still apply. Everyone will be able to read longer posts, but only Blue subscribers can create them. This means that no longer will you need to compromise on the great copy you have prepared. The longer posts allows for a reading experience similar to that seen on Facebook and LinkedIn.
-
Text formatting
Previously if you wanted to make text stand out on socials, you needed to use a third party tool to generate alternative formatting. Now you can bold and italicise text in your posts directly within x.com. Again, this will help the posts stand out from those which are using the standard text formatting.
-
Longer video upload
Share more content with your followers. As a subscribe to Blue, you will be eligible to upload videos up to two hours long and up to 8GB file size (1080p). This is a huge increase over the standard limit of just 2 minutes 20 seconds and 512MB file size.
-
Access to Media Studio
Manage the images and videos you’ve uploaded to X with the X Media Studio. This works similar to the media Library in a CMS allowing you to retrieve and reuse images and videos you have shared previously.
-
SMS two-factor authentication
As an X Blue subscriber, you can add another layer of protection to your account with access to two-factor authentication via SMS. This helps prevent loss of the account by hackers, etc.
Pricing
The pricing is not as simple as it could be. The prices vary by country and by the device you sign up on. A list of the prices can be found on their website. At the time of producing this report (July 2023), the pricing for the UK is as follows.
- Desktop / Web: Monthly £9.60 and annually £100.80
- Mobile / iOS / Android: Monthly £11.00 and annually £114.99
Summary
Based on the above list of features, we would suggest that X Blue is a worthwhile investment for those who have a good following on X and post regularly.
The ability to be able to post longer than 280 characters is a huge plus and the fact that any replies on other profiles, posts, etc have a slight boost will surely help with engagement. Other benefits such as the longer video length and size, and being able to
format text will save time in posting as there is no need to compress or trim videos and no need to use third party tools to generate formatted text.
X Blue is a relatively new service that only launched properly at the end of 2022. Despite that, it already provides a well-rounded feature list that has continued to expand and offer greater value. If you are considering upgrading to the paid service on X (Twitter) and would like some assistance, please contact us.
