Twitter and Revue: do they match up?

Twitter, is having a bit of a moment right now.

From launching new features such as tip jars, disappearing tweets, and a potential Clubhouse killer, to flat-out blocking the President of the United States (of the time) out of his presidential account, the platform is finally exerting its influence – in a good way.

One of Twitter’s recent acquisitions has been the newsletter platform, Revue. In this post, Kirsty McGlashan reviews how Revue newsletters can be used by Twitter Influencers to keep their followers engaged.

What is Revue?

Revue is a newsletter platform that was acquired by Twitter back in January to make the two services work together and build on influencers’ current Twitter following. You can now sign up to Revue with your Twitter and post one newsletter a day to the platform getting analytics and insights on Revue. 

Newsletters are a great way to reach your audience as part of email marketing. They can be used to share important information or entertainment which is relevant to your subscribers. As the users have to opt-in, the audience has already shown interest in what you have to say but the content still needs to be consistent, eye-catching and engaging to grab the reader’s eye amongst their other emails. 

Twitter’s idea is that users with a big following know what their audience wants to see and will be able to build a subscriber base of followers that want to see more from them. This helps users extend their reach beyond the Twitter dashboard while still staying in the twitter hub.

How to Create a Revue Newsletter:

Basics

• Each newsletter has an issue number
• Headers and Text can be used for formatting
• Images, videos, and tweets can be imported
• The right panel has a list of links recent posted on your Twitter for easy access
  • You can also sync other accounts like Facebook, Instagram, Pocket, and more to share links from
• Can Preview and test the final product before posting

Create

The Create option is where you build your newsletter. Writing is only one part of the newsletter making use of images and links equally. These work best short and to the point which fits Twitter with their short character limits. Revue does not currently have a character limit but less is more.

Issues

The issues tab is next and where you can find the list of your newsletters that can be managed, scheduled, and edited here. Analytics on your posted newsletters are available giving you an easy comparison page. 

Subscribers

As you can see in the image above, I have no subscribers for my newsletter. The new tab is where you can add and manage your recipients. There are a number of ways Revue has to add recipients which makes it easy to build your subscriber list:

• Import from Mailchimp
• Import via CSV or Pasting Addresses
• Manually add a subscriber
• Add your own email to test

Insights

Insights are the final tab. Here you can see the data from your posts using data for the past week, month, or 3, 6, 12 months. This tab has subcategories to break down the data into easy-to-digest information.

Performance

‘Performance’, tells you how well your post was received by your subscribers. The data provided is given in a percentage, chart and graph making is visually appealing. The performance statistics are:

• Average Open Rate
• Average Click Rate 

Growth

Next is the growth of your subscriber base. Newsletters are only sent out via email so you need to promote your newsletter to get more people to sign up. The data tells you where subscribers came from giving you information on the best source of subscribers so you know which to promote:

• Embed a subscribe form
• Integrate Zapier
• API
• Manually added

Engagement

Engagement levels let you know the overall opening levels of your newsletters. These levels are broken down into high, medium, low, and none. While performance gives you an average, engagement tells you how many perform at each level and can be compared month on month once you have posted 4 issues. 

• High – opened ⅔ or more of the  last 10 issues
• Medium – opened ⅓ or more of the last 10 issues
• Low – opened less than ⅓ of your last 10 issues
• None – opened none of your last 10 issues

Breakdown

Strengths

• Easy to use
• Free
• Provides insights and analytics 
• Easy to import links and twitter posts
• Easy set up with Twitter
• Opportunities to use the numbered titles as part of your newsletter strategy

Weaknesses

• They all look the same
• Cannot personalise the title
• No automatic promotion on Twitter 
• Need a subscriber base to start
• Uses your Twitter username to tied to your Twitter

Summary

Revue currently seems like a very simple newsletter platform but with Twitter continuing to add integration between Revue and Twitter the two could work well together. It could help Twitter users expand their communication with their followers beyond character-limited tweets and give people that want to see it a more in-depth analysis or reaction. I think more personalisation features will need to be added to make each newsletter stand out as it would be hard to distinguish two newsletters from each other currently but overall it is good to see Twitter looking beyond its own platform as its users grow.