Bye Screenshots—Now, You Can Post Tweets Directly to Snapchat

The internet and social media platforms have become invaluable parts of life during COVID-19. They’ve proven time and time again to be a source of connection, community, laughter, and information (although, be sure to triple check your sources.) It’s also been highly entertaining, granting us access to memes, short-form viral TikTok or Reels videos, and of course, hilarious tweets. Twitter announced a collaboration with the Gen-Z favorite app Snapchat this week, which will allow Twitter users to share posts to their Snapchat stories.

This update means users can officially do away with screenshotting and posting from your camera roll, and instead share directly to their followers with a link to the original post.

The social media giant announced this collab yesterday, and the ability to share directly to your story is available for iOS and Android users. Worth noting: you can’t tweet from within the Snapchat app (or not yet, at least), you can only repost an existing tweet, aka, one that was tweeted through Twitter’s platform. Once you add a tweet to your story, you get full access to Snapchat’s creation tools – meaning you can add commentary on the tweet, gifs, stickers, and whatever else you’d like to get your point across to your followers.

This collab is great news for anyone who’s ever had a tweet go viral. It’s nice to have your username attached to a tweet, but you don’t necessarily gain any new followers or traction from a screenshotted post. So weird to think that your post could get picked up by a larger meme account or be shared to someone’s story, be seen by hundreds or even thousands of people, and you could go weeks without even knowing. Now, thanks to this update, it will be evident if your tweet is getting a lot of traction from being shared to other’s stories (outside, of course, of the post’s stats, which have always populated directly under a tweet, displaying the number of likes, retweets, and quote tweets it has received.)

Twitter also posted that this post-straight-to-story update is being tested for Instagram as well. No word on when we can expect to see this new feature as a collab with Instagram, but it will likely be within the next few months.

These collaborations mark the beginnings of what some social media experts have long predicted: a continuous blurring of the lines between user’s various social media platforms. If this continues, will there be a need to have an Instagram and a Twitter and a Facebook and a TikTok? Or, will a new, mega-platform arise as a blend of all the major platforms, eradicating the need for multiple pages entirely.

We may be a long way out from that happening, but at the rate things are going, it doesn’t feel all that far-fetched! And, maybe a little bit like an episode of Black Mirror…

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