Twitter rolled out Fleets in Spring 2020, giving users a Stories-like way to publish ephemeral content on the platform. 

And as of Tuesday, you’ll also see ads with your Fleets. 

Both video and image-based Fleet ads will appear in between content from the folks you follow, and advertisers will be able to see all the usual performance metrics for their campaigns. 

This latest announcement is part of a bigger trend of new product developments at Twitter. You may have seen some of this taking off with the addition of Twitter Spaces, a live audio framework that looks like Clubhouse, and recently acquired a newsletter product called Revue. 

But behind these new features is careful thought from the leadership team about what their audience members want and need. 

“And so for us, all of the work we do starts from the standpoint of: what are our customers trying to hire us for? What are they firing us for? And how do we build product solutions that have those dimensions in mind?” says Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s Head of Consumer Product. 

“[Fleets] didn’t start from the standpoint of, let’s copy Stories. We started it from the standpoint of ‘why are people not tweeting?’ It turns out that some of the reasons they’re not tweeting is they don’t feel safe…because what they tweet is subject to public scrutiny. Tweets are on the public record, which is terrifying.”

To find out more about Twitter’s upcoming product map and how the company makes decisions, I recommend reading this full interview with Beykpour. 

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