If you haven’t opened Twitter for a couple of days, we invite you to do so now: just log onto the webpage, and look in the upper left corner. If you’re seeing the new logo for the first time, sit with it for a moment. 

This is the new phase of Twitter, one that’s moving forward without its eponymous blue bird. 

For twelve years, Twitter has been the place where people went to talk. Then Jack Dorsey left, Elon Musk took over, and the new vision for Twitter has been in play since then. A little over one year into his tenure as Twitter CEO, the first of some massive, divisive changes have rolled out – and it started before the blue bird’s departure. 

Here’s what it means for your business, and what we’re looking at for the future. 

Twitter: A Timeline

Let’s go back to the beginning. 

2006: Twitter launches and CEO Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet. 

2007: The South by Southwest conference sees a ballooning of Tweets from 20,000 per day to 60,000 per day, starting a period of cascading growth. 

2008: Hashtags are officially supported. 

2010: Twitter launches ‘promoted tweets’, kicking off its potential as an advertising platform, though it never quite catches on. 

2011: Twitter overhauls its design. 

2012: Twitter purchases Vine, a shortform video platform, bumping its rating up to 17+ in Apple’s app store. 

2013: Twitter launches Twitter Music, an app for the iPhone. 

2014: Twitter announces the release of new anti-harassment tools to combat one of its main growing issues – rampant abuse on the platform.

2015: Twitter showcases its new marketing platform partners, opening up the opportunity for marketers to target ads to specific audiences. Tweets are now seen in Google’s search results. 

2016: Vine discontinued and the Twitter Dashboard, its business app, is shut down. 

2017: Twitter launches the Explore tab, combining their trends, live video streams, search, and Moments, a way for people to get an overview of important tweets or threads. 

2018: Jack Dorsey testifies before the Senate about election meddling for the 2016 elections alongside current Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. 

2019: Twitter reveals that it has suspended 4,800 accounts linked to the Iran government. 

2022: Elon Musk takes over Twitter. 

That brings us to 2023. Here’s an overview of all the platform’s changes from the beginning of the year to now. 

January: 

• Third-party API access is revoked. This means apps and websites that relied on third-party APIs to share content to and from Twitter, such as WordPress, no longer function. (For WordPress, this was later fixed, but other third-party APIs are still inoperable). 

February: 

• Twitter aims to change its ad targeting to function like Google’s search ads. 
• Further layoffs were executed, continuing the trend from November 2022. 
• The Twitter algorithm is changed to boost Elon Musk’s personal tweets by a factor of 1000. 

March: 

• The Twitter press team stops responding to enquiries. Elon Musk announces that all press communications will be auto-responded with ?.
• Twitter releases its algorithm to the public on Github. 

April: 

• New labels are launched for state-affiliated media, which are applied to broadcasting companies such as NPR, BBC, and PBS – notably not state-affiliated. 
• Verification is now a paid service under Twitter Blue. 
• Cessation of the policy to label state-affiliated media, including for Chinese and Russian state media. 

June:

• Measures were implemented to limit the amount of tweets that could be seen per day. 

July: 

• Twitter is rebranded and renamed ‘X’.  

Is the Twitter rebrand that bad?

It’s too early to tell if it’ll be bad or good for Twitter. 

What we can say is this: 

In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary expanded its definition of ‘tweet’ – a word in use since the 1800s – to specifically refer to posting on Twitter. When a brand has become so entrenched in daily life that it becomes part of daily conversation to the point where it introduces a new word into the lexicon, it’s powerful. Only a few brands have managed it successfully – we Google things, we retweet someone’s opinion, we check out someone’s Insta. 

We can also say this: Twitter’s recognisability as a brand is a poisoned chalice. Yes, it has the reputation of being the public town square – a place where you go to learn. A lot of historical events played out on Twitter, and people around the world had a front row seat to them via updates from verified sources. 

Think of the Ukrainian war. Think of the Black Lives Matters protests. Think of the January 6th riots on the Capitol. 

But here’s the other side of it: Twitter also has a notable reputation for being a place where content moderation is fast and loose, and harassment is particularly bad and something they’ve been struggling to control since 2015, to limited efficacy.

Rebranding to X will not necessarily remove that negative reputation – but if you’re playing the long game, it’s possible it could help. 

Now that the Twitter brand is dead, is it the end of the platform for good?

It’s possible, but it’s also unlikely. 

Social media platforms that have grown and grown to Twitter’s size and userbase have a unique selling point that other social media platforms just don’t have. The reason they’ve managed to grow so much is because of that unique selling point – and it’s what Twitter still has going for it, even with the rebrand, even with all the API changes, even with the declining interest by advertisers. 

Twitter is losing money. Twitter has always been losing money. It’s never managed to achieve the same advertising revenue as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, or Youtube – but it’s far from being the only social media platform that haemorrhages money. Tumblr and Reddit, two of the most popular platforms, also lose significant cash.  

Elon Musk’s divisive practices have hastened the dropping user numbers, but Twitter is still functioning, Twitter still has people using it as their primary platform, and Twitter is unlikely to go away overnight. 

And that unique selling point is why: no other site does microblogging quite as well. The new ones that have cropped up – Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey – are still too new to see whether or not they’ll be any good. 

Twitter was a very good platform for artists to advertise their products. It was a platform where journalists crowdsourced information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. We watched elections play out on Twitter, coordinated information from countries where obtaining information was difficult. 

Twitter’s reputation was never great, but it was never any worse than other social media platforms. 

And what it had in spades was brand equity. 

With the rebrand, that recognition is gone. 

But the general consensus on the platform itself is this: whatever it’s going to be called, it’s still Twitter in their minds. 

Facebook went through something similar – although officially it’s now called Meta, people still use Facebook to refer to the company at large, and the scandals that plagued Facebook to begin with followed them through. If it is an attempt to wipe the slate clean of Twitter’s previous issues and start anew, it’s not a gambit that works well when the issues are big enough. 

What about the idea of an everything app?

Allegedly, part of the rebrand is because Twitter wants to move into becoming the Western equivalent of an everything app – similar to WeChat, in China. 

The theory is sound. Several apps do more than one thing: Tiktok, for example, allows you to show their products within the app. 

Where it might falter is in practice. 

Forget the difficulties of creating a secure payment service that will work with X. Forget the server impacts of turning Twitter into an app where you can do everything – hosting images, videos, longform content, mini apps. 

Regulators don’t want Western tech companies to know so much of your information. European privacy laws alone would slice Twitter’s everything app to ribbons. WeChat in China is a case study that might not be possible to repeat outside of China, and it’s all because of the legal ramifications of data privacy and breaking up tech monopolies. 

Beyond that, Twitter’s reputation comes back into play for this – consumers just don’t trust the app itself in its current state. To launch an everything app that can do, well, everything, there needs to be a baseline belief in the app to perform those functions well, and for Twitter, that doesn’t seem to exist. 

Twitter was the place where academics could talk about their research, journalists could speak freely, and internet users could go somewhere that wasn’t bloated down with ads and sponsors the way Meta apps were.

It has also been the place you go to to vent about small things, things that were on your mind but didn’t merit the effort of a Facebook post, things that you could complain about in peace to the global public.

That opinion hasn’t shifted, even under the Musk leadership. 

What else could happen with the rebrand?

Here’s the thing: it’s so early to tell what could happen with the rebrand that opinions vary greatly.

Let’s see what the team has to say: 

Ed

It is too early. One thing we have learned in the world of tech is to never say never. Of course, the regulatory hurdles in the way of achieving the new vision for X are significant, driven by a slumbering bureaucratic giant that the EU keeps ballooning into. Do I agree with wiping out billions in brand equity by killing the Twitter name? I find that a hard one to swallow in these early days. Will the brand X ever rebuild that equity? It really depends on how users take to the platform if they steadily increase the time spent in-app. That’s up to the unpredictable misfiring of Musk’s brain and the team he appoints to steward the brand and the product as it boldly goes where other apps have gone before. And knowing who is behind it, the outcome will either be a catastrophic failure we’d enjoy watching from a distance or a success we couldn’t possibly have predicted. As always, it’s up to us to keep an open mind and a watchful eye. This way we retain the agility to make the best of either situation.

Lisa

This really doesn’t affect me, I’ve never really paid attention to Twitter. But, looking at both logos side by side, the new one looks much less welcoming. I’m wondering if that’s a reflection of a new policy. As a completely unbiased outsider I’m interested to see how this is going to pan out, changing the brand at this stage after you’ve built so much equity could go either way, and it’s probably going to be wildly entertaining whichever way it goes.

Kim

I think we need diversity online as much as we need it in the real world. With Elon Musk taking over so many organisations that we use frequently and practically live on, I feel like that has the effect of flattening out the overall feel of these brands and our online experience. I think Twitter as a brand, with its cute blue bird, represented something that still had some form of diversity in it. With the ‘X’ rebrand and its echoing of so many other tech-obsessed brand imagery and ethos, I feel like it’s taken what Twitter might stand for for a lot of people, and chucked it out the window. With any kind of monopoly, we run the risk of homogenising the type of messaging and voices we’re exposed to, and instead of providing a platform for diversity it becomes one where only those opinions that fit within the brand’s idea will be favoured. Think of Disney and its hold on the media we consume; it has shaped a lot of our thinking in a way that’s probably more vanilla, conservative, and binary than it is (or should be) in real life.

Luke

This is definitely not how I pictured the Twitter brand meeting its downfall. Even though it had its struggles, it was an incredibly valuable resource and entertainment hub, especially with the improvements that were being made in recent years to the way misinformation was being handled. It formed part of a very select group of brands that had their name turned into a verb – I Xeroxed, Googled, Hoovered, Tweeted. I see this as the definitive end of this social media platform as we know it, and X is going to be a different beast altogether. But the beauty of the internet is that the real-estate is endless. The communities that inhabit it remain basically the same, and will flock from place to place like a cat fitting into different cardboard boxes. The question for businesses is, where will they flock to next if they don’t like the further inevitable changes that Musk is going to implement in the coming years?

Cam

Underneath the rebrand is a new direction for the social platform. Twitter has been a great resource for people needing to share info in situations where sharing information is throttled (like in the 2023 Turkish elections) – I’m afraid that the direction Musk is taking the platform in is diametrically opposite to this freedom of speech. 

Ernesta

The recent rebrand feels very hasty to me for a few reasons. One, it literally happened overnight without much warning. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s done well, though. Secondly, it doesn’t seem that the whole platform and processes were ready for it – the rollout of the brand seems to be lagging across platforms and devices. Three, the new logo. Using a single character from an existing font on a flat black background feels totally rushed, low-budget and quite disappointing, considering how much time, thought and effort it takes to develop a strong visual brand identity. And I have to agree with Lisa, it does not feel inviting at all. It gives that ‘taken over by the dark side’ vibe.

Andrea

I’ve followed very little at this point, and I can’t say i used twitter regularly. But, I think, we’re still looking at a logo and have not seen the overall impact of the changes that are coming to the platform. Personally, I think the biggest shock is coming from the shift from an approachable blue bird to a very ‘masculine’ X plastered on black. Can such a large platform make many drastic changes at one go? Probably not – so I think, or hope, that we are not seeing the full picture yet. For the sake of my homescreen, I hope that there’s more work to be done on the X though. 

Sam

I have never really been a Twitter user, so I don’t feel too strongly about this. I did notice that the new logo looks a lot more bland, cold, and doesn’t stand out compared to the old logo. The old logo was very distinguishable and easy to tell that it belonged to Twitter. If someone saw the new logo without knowing about the change, I don’t think they would know what brand it belongs to. I do think that rebranding is giving them a presence in the press and gets people’s attention because it will be talked about. Even though it might not be positive awareness, it is awareness, nonetheless. However, once the talk about this shift blows over, their equity might continue to decline, especially with the recent introduction of Threads. Ultimately, I think it might be too soon to forecast the direction of Twitter’s future. 

Thomas

I find it hard to believe Musk’s goal of making X the WeChat of the West will come to fruition. WeChat is notoriously used as a tool for spying on the Chinese by the government, something that will encounter a lot of resistance on our side of the world, especially with the EU’s stringent personal protection laws. Besides that, the conglomeration of all aspects of services offered by WeChat could never fly in the West with competition and anti-market-dominance laws.

Ranson

Look, Twitter has always been kind of THE place for a bit of craziness (Degeneracy is a strong word, although I wanted to use it), however, it has always been the place for news, whistleblowers, leakers and entertainment. I used to use it to get information about things before Youtube, Instagram and the news could report about it. I figure that that specific use will still not stop. 

Like Ed said, the change is ultimately unpredictable. The same person who made this decision made Paypal and Tesla into the giants they are today. So it could kind of make sense to wipe Twitter as a whole. But as Luke said, it became a verb, it’s a very exclusive and strong brand equity that’s hard to compete with. To say that they’re venturing into the deep is an understatement. My opinion is that the whole decision will be beneficial for reputation, however, it will bear fruit in the far future, which may be too late because of Tiktok and their increasing influence.

What does this mean for businesses?

At this not much. Could Twitter become the next hot thing in business advertising? Eh. Its purpose as an everything app sort of precludes the idea that you can use it for advertising, and while it’s trying to package something of LinkedIn in its new direction, Twitter is probably going to remain fundamentally Twitter. 

That doesn’t mean it’s bad for business. It just means you might need a different way of approaching how you use Twitter – and that’s fine. 

Twitter’s not going anywhere yet. We think it’s not going to go anywhere for a long time, rebrand notwithstanding. After that – who knows? The story’s changing quickly. 

But we’ll be keeping up with it. This kind of shift doesn’t happen often – and if Twitter really does succeed in changing to an everything app, it could definitely open up avenues for a new kind of marketing. 

For now, it’s time to watch and wait. 

The post RIP, Twitter, or the future of X appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The internet has a habit of amplifying the human condition.

If there is something we’re great at, we get to see a lot of it – training dogs to perform tricks, recipes to make kale edible, breaking Olympic records, and how to tear a pair of jeans into an entire outfit.

If there is something that we suck at, then the internet amplifies this to an extreme. We don’t need examples of this. You surely have a memory of something horrifying you saw on the internet that made you doubt whether our species ought to persist.

But there is one thing we all struggle with. It is called cognitive dissonance. We are a species almost incapable of holding two opposing notions in our minds at the same time, even if they are both valid.

So we create a single view about absolutely everything in an attempt to simplify the world. If we love some stuff and hate some other stuff, there is this comforting binary space (the irony of which doesn’t go unnoticed) that is devoid of grey areas.

When anything happens anywhere in the world, we examine it and, undecided, read the opinions of people in our social streams. Unsurprisingly, there is a relatively homogeneous opinion – our spheres love it or hate it (there is an even worse fate – that of a whole lot of unimpressed ‘meh’ reactions).

Then we commit. We’re all in and invested or we’re hating the guts of whoever made the news.

Today, after a few weeks of typical Elon Musk cryptic tweets, Twitter seems to have agreed to go private, with Musk purchasing the shares for somewhere in the region of $44 billion.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter exploded once again. And just as predictable is an overwhelmingly binary set of reactions (along with the usual ‘if he spent so much money doing this why didn’t he spend them doing that?).

Broadly speaking, the two positions are:

• Now that this billionaire owns Twitter, he will single handedly control the narrative for the planet, eliminating free speech and turning the platform into the voice that suits him. This is the fault of woke culture and a win for the right wing. There will be an exodus from Twitter as a result.

• Now that this billionaire owns Twitter, he will have no investor interests to protect and can allow Twitter to self-regulate, bringing the terrifying prospect of a free platform to the masses. A truly free platform doesn’t censor people like Donald Trump and allows for their lies, hate speech, and misinformed positions. There will be an exodus from Twitter as a result.

So, if Elon Musk knew that the world would be divided by the news and that neither of the positions is apparently an ideal outcome, why did he make such an expensive move?

If we knew the inner workings of his mind, we’d be just as rich. We cannot presume to know the totality of all the moving parts that are in motion when a deal of this magnitude is struck. What we can observe is a pattern of behaviour.

The billionaire who is a fan of a Formula 1 team and sees it struggle as a result of poor business decisions wakes up one morning and buys the team. The same happens with favourite football teams, media outlets, retail giants… we’ve seen this happen before and there is no stopping it. After all, the world’s billionaires are getting younger and, paradoxically, give fewer fucks than their ageing counterparts.

What do we think of it?

At Switch, we have a healthy discussion going on about the news. We’re presenting a few quotes rather than editing them into a single position because, well, we’re not vanilla.

We’re conflicted

Tom was quite succinct, preferring to dig deeper before committing to a complete opinion but he is certain about one thing:

“I honestly haven’t read much into it though the thought of Donald Trump being given a platform on twitter again is pretty scary.”

Tom

Elise, always happy to handle conflicting points of view, says:

“I’m conflicted because while it does mean a big change for Twitter and a greater platform for far-right pundits, it’s not like Twitter doesn’t already have major issues – what we’re probably going to see is a mass exodus of people, which happens every time a social media becomes too big and therefore starts trying to implement changes. We saw it with Facebook: people are on Instagram. Then we saw it on Instagram: people are now on Twitter.

The only difference is that there isn’t a ready small platform to take over from Twitter now, but there will be eventually, or everyone will end up on Reddit/Tumblr.”

Elise

We’re against it

Rik lands quite firmly on one side of the debate:

“Makes sense that Elon Musk would buy the social media platform that’s mainly inhabited by bots – it tallies with his vision of a future for androids.

Seriously, though, my biggest concern with Musk buying Twitter is that we haven’t had a time in which one individual has owned a social media platform (when it was popular). Zuckerberg and Dorsey were limited because they are in charge of publicly listed companies. This will be different.

Rik

There’s also the bigger worry that this is Elon Musk. He’s always been a very shady individual, someone who put his personal gain and his ego over everything else, someone who does token moves of “free speech” from time to time, someone who has a god complex, and will go after people who show dissent in ways that are extremely unfair and irresponsible, for example:

• trying to get publicity with his submarine to save the kids in Thailand, then calling the diver who actually saved them a pedophile,
• Using his Twitter following to pump and dump stocks and crypto
• Asking his legal team to fire an employee because he was part of an investigation into his malpractice in an earlier job
• Getting a Tesla employee fired when he raised safety concerns about one of the cars (on his personal blog)
• a journalist who had been critical of the Tesla Model X launch event was called by Musk personally and had their order for a Model X canceled

The big worry with Musk owning Twitter is that he will allow it to become a romping ground for right wing conspiracy theorists, because he’s one of them himself.

There is a lot to be said about free speech, but he’s shown that he’s only a supporter of free speech as long as it works in his favour.

Rik

And he clearly doesn’t understand moderation or free speech – based on this interview he’d allow anything that was legal, and only stuff that’s legal. This would be a big problem in a country like the US (where hate speech, technically, is legal, and in countries with authoritarian leaders, where any dissent is illegal).

Will he allow tweets in favour of unionisation at Tesla?

There’s one ray of light. If he does make Twitter a platform in which everyone can be verified, then it would make it easier to spot bots, that’s about the only positive thing to come out of this, in my opinion. But then what would Tesla do without shills? 

Or will he make exceptions for the bots that help him line his pockets?“

We’re here for it

While Ed remains cautiously optimistic:

“Whether truthful or not, Elon has committed to his version of free speech, ostensibly his reason for making the acquisition in the first place. His tweet saying “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means” is out there, committed to the collective memory that the internet is.

My first move would be to restore Donald Trump’s account, even if I despise everything he stands for. I’m firm in my position about freedom of expression and reject every form of censorship. This starts with where it hurts most – those with opinions that are diametrically opposed to my own.

A truly free platform would be an exceptionally useful tool and, like every good tool, can be used for almost any purpose.

Ed

A knife can carve steak or fatally stab. A plane can take me across the Atlantic in a few hours and can be flown into a building. A truly free platform is a great idea if we are to accept the possibility that there will always be a sizeable chunk of its users with whom I have nothing in common. They will write stuff that will anger me. They will take the ‘wrong’ side of every debate. They will incite anger and hatred and resentment. They will reflect their humanity in a snack-sized chunk of words we call a tweet. They will do what the village square did for millennia. And when Twitter was first conceived, before it took the inevitably tortuous path that every public company takes, it was created to give the exact same 140 characters to every user.

Jack Dorsey was quick to endorse the move to privatization of the platform, whatever his opinion is worth, “The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.” One must keep in mind that he will net close to $1 billion as a result of the deal.

Let’s remember something pretty obvious. We are talking about Twitter. We are discussing a platform that we voluntarily signed up for and use whenever we feel like it. We choose our feed by curating the list of people we follow. Talking about Twitter as if it were the sole bastion of democracy, as though we were part owners of the company, as if it were an oracle or a divine presence, is grossly missing the point. The news is that a billionaire bought a social media platform – we know the name of the platform, we know the name of the man, and he makes his interests very public as often as he can. He is entitled to turn it into his own broadcast medium, a cooking show, a kitten-video-only platform, or even to shut it down tomorrow.

In general, however, I remain cautiously optimistic. Musk is a renegade and has a mind the likes of which we see a handful of times in a generation. Of course, he is flawed. Of course, he has made moves that history may judge as mistakes. But I suspect that a $44 billion investment is one that not even he can take lightly. And if there is an initial exodus, a pruning of the platform that makes it a better place, I’m all for quality over quantity. I just hope that as many people I disagree with stay on, because without them Twitter would be a pretty boring place.”

We’re looking ahead

Luke, ever the pragmatic analyst, is already looking ahead at where the potential Twitter exodus will lead us:

“LinkedIn could also potentially become a place where Twitter users end up, if for example Trump is allowed back on the platform.”

Luke

A sentiment echoed by Lisa who considers us a utilitarian herd:

“People will go to different places depending on their need.”

Lisa

What does all of this mean for those of us using Twitter as a communications tool for their business?

As always, we don’t have a crystal ball. The deal itself has not yet properly gone through and here we are, attempting to gaze into the future and see how we can capitalize on the change.

The shape of Twitter is expected to change slightly almost immediately but that’s as much as we know. Apart from the ability to edit tweets (a big deal in the Twitter universe), a more inclusive way of verifying yourself as a human and not a bot, and a reversal of several censorship policies, we know very little of the plans for the platform’s future.

What is certain is that all eyes are on Twitter right now. Being part of the conversation is essential – today more than ever. Even the most vociferous naysayers are hanging around for a while, watching the events play out as they wait for the right moment to make a dramatic exit.

So while it would make plenty of sense to take to Twitter right now as it enjoys a surge in popularity, it also makes sense to listen to Luke and to Lisa and to look at the other platforms that could gain from a potential exodus. If your Twitter game has been on point so far, maybe dial it up a notch, but be sure to cozy up to LinkedIn as you do so.

The post Coping with divisive news. Or, how the Elon/Twitter debacle had us all in a twist appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The CEO of Twitter stepping down is one of them. 

Social media networks are run like little empires. Unless the king dies or gets his head chopped off, the creator who makes the social media platform keeps hold of it as it grows, as it wanes, and as it starts over. There are exceptions: Tom from MySpace, Karp from Tumblr. 

But those are outliers. 

This is different. 

Jack Dorsey runs a successful social media site. It isn’t as popular as Facebook or Instagram and it doesn’t have the same reach as Tiktok, but it’s a fringe social network that’s popular with the people on it. Brands can build a decent following on it. People are happy to participate in the latest Twitter discourse. 

When Facebook and Instagram went down a few months ago, everyone flocked to Twitter as a replacement. 

It’s not a site you step down from.

Let’s talk about what it means. 

What happened: 

Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter, resigned from his post and appointed Parag Agrawal as his successor. Dorsey, who also owns Square, posted a screenshot of his resignation email to Twitter on the 29th of November. 

Why did he step down?

In his email, Dorsey stated that founder-led companies are limited in their reach and prone to failure.  He also stated that the time for him to step away is right: with Parag taking over as CEO and Bret Taylor as board chair, the implication is that Twitter no longer needs him to stay as CEO. 

At the bottom, he added a note: he wants Twitter to become ‘the most transparent company in the world’. 

Theories: 

The internet is a puzzle box of opinions. Here is a collection of the theories that  are trending about Jack Dorsey’s resignation:

1. Jack Dorsey resigned to focus more on his fintech and blockchain endeavours. 

Square, his payment company, is up and coming. Since 2019, Dorsey has been vocal about wanting to devote more and more of his time to blockchain, fintech, cryptocurrency: all the neo-financial buzzwords. With the advent of Bluesky, a decentralised social media project, maybe Dorsey’s finally moving on from tech and into a different flavour of tech – one that he’s been passionate enough about to tell a crowd, ‘if I wasn’t at Twitter or Square, I’d be in cryptocurrency’. 

2. Twitter is failing and Dorsey wants to get out before it collapses. 

Twitter is the crowning glory of awful social media habits. You’ve heard of ‘cancel culture’? Well, Twitter is where it started. Doxxing, bullying, no support from staff – everything that Twitter went through in the past year or so has just cemented the idea that no good can come from Twitter. 

But it has a dedicated core user base, and big plans for the future. 

Leaving all of that now doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

3. Jack Dorsey didn’t want to come back to Twitter in the first place. 

Dorsey was ousted from his role early on in Twitter’s rise, and he only came back after a few short years. From the looks of it, this is just par for the course for Dorsey. And it tracks with the beliefs that pushed him to make Twitter the first company that allowed its employees to work from home indefinitely. 

What does it mean for marketers?

At this it doesn’t mean anything for marketers. 

Twitter isn’t a sound platform to advertise on. To talk on, and build brand love, it’s excellent – but you have to set your brand aside a little bit to do it. 

And you have to make sure you don’t end up talking to yourself. Big corporations who own multiple brands are called out for this often. 

As a platform, Twitter’s core users are only slightly less reactionary than Reddit’s for advertising. Jack Dorsey’s departure doesn’t really make a difference to that kind of attitude. 

What does it mean for other social media platforms?

If it’s a direct dig at some of the other CEOs, it’s not going to convince them to step down (looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg). When all you have to show for your tenure is strife, and you still don’t want to relinquish control, a dig by another social media CEO isn’t going to get you to quit. 

What it could do is open up a conversation about whether social media should be democratised from their owners, and if founders should have so much control over them. Think ‘Death of the Author’, but if it was social networks: a social media without the original founder, and therefore the original vision, and the differences it could make to how that social media runs. 

When platforms get too big, and then they have too much power, to have that resting in the vision of a single person is risky. 

And the step from ‘I know best’ to ‘do as I say’ is small, and slippery, and easy to miss. 

However, most CEOs won’t take that step, even when it would be better for them to do so. 

The Outcome 

Dorsey’s left. His vision was what guided Twitter into becoming the place it is today. 

But he hadn’t been invested in Twitter for a while. 

Staying in his role when his interest in running Twitter has gone isn’t going to help anyone, least of all Twitter. 

With Dorsey gone, Twitter has some room to grow. 

Whether it does, or not, no longer has anything to do with Dorsey. 

What we think will happen: 

Twitter won’t change – not externally. 

But one of their biggest challenges is to increase revenue and users. 

And one of the best ways to do that is to add more brand tools to the platform that’ll allow brands to advertise more effectively. These tools have already been around for a little while, but Dorsey was famously ambivalent towards brands, and gave control of the big decisions over to employees. 

With Parag, there is a chance that Twitter can become a better platform for brands to advertise on, but there’s a caveat: Twitter users are tired of brands talking the same way as they do about things they don’t understand. 

So the challenges to increase Twitter’s reach might not go anywhere, even with Dorsey no longer there.

But we do think Twitter can grow from this. 

It’ll never be a brand platform on the same level as Facebook and Instagram. They’ve had too much time to grow, too much time to take over the biggest portion of the playing field, and too much time to figure out what they need to do. 

But it can be a contender. And it can become very, very excellent for some brands who can communicate at the level of their consumers, and talk to them like real people. 

Our advice: wait and see. 

And don’t knock Twitter out of the advertising game yet. 

There’s a lot more to it than memes.

The post Jack Dorsey and Where Twitter Can Go From Here appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Over the past weeks, we’ve been talking about what marketers and brands have to keep in mind when communicating to their audiences in 2021. One of the key takeaways from everything we’ve learned so far is that younger generations aren’t afraid to call out brands when they screw up. Enter the Burger King Women’s Day tweet. 

The Tweet

Seeing this from a fast food restaurant as you’re scrolling through your Twitter feed is going to trigger two things:

1. You’re gonna think/say what the hell?
2. You’re gonna click on it to see what people are saying in response, and whether there’s any context you’re somehow missing.

At which point, you’ll realise that you were indeed missing some context.

So to recap, Burger King leveraged people’s instant reaction of outrage to their first tweet in order to build awareness of a new scholarship programme that promotes women’s opportunities in the culinary industry.

There are two main camps when it comes to people’s reaction to this series of events. The first camp is made up of those who see the intentional manipulation of people’s attention through a very inflammatory statement as a big no-no. They see it as yet another big corporation trying to build their brand using clickbaity language surrounding emotionally charged topics to their advantage.

This seems to be the vocal majority, as admonishments came swiftly and harshly. Even from other brands.

There’s better ways to draw attention to something that don’t including using the most sexist trope ever

— Chloé: unicorn of snark ?? (@snarkgrapefruit) March 8, 2021

this is such a weird tweet, how did this get through higher ups

— kira (@YungCatgirl) March 8, 2021

You get the picture.

Burger King originally defended their stance, answering those who opposed their unorthodox method of garnering attention. Eventually, they had to concede that it was doing more harm than good. After an apology-tweet, they took down the original and the subsequent thread.

We hear you. We got our initial tweet wrong and we’re sorry. Our aim was to draw attention to the fact that only 20% of professional chefs in UK kitchens are women and to help change that by awarding culinary scholarships. We will do better next time.

— Burger King (@BurgerKingUK) March 8, 2021

What can brands learn from this?

As the new generations of consumers are coming into their own, brands are understanding that what they do to better their communities is going to help win long-term loyalty. The problem comes when they don’t understand the fine line between just doing good things and talking about doing good things a little too loudly.

In this case, Burger King (who are well known for their great marketing antics) took things a step further than usual with their clickbait tactics. Even though it was ultimately well-meaning, it ended up blowing up in their face. 

One might argue that it achieved Burger King’s objective of grabbing attention for their cause, but at what cost? Are people even going to remember what their efforts were? In this particular case, a number of news networks picked up the story, but most of the coverage doesn’t paint a particularly pretty picture for Burger King. There is no doubt that references to this fiasco are going to be a mainstay on their Twitter account for a while.

Although we are bombarded with new information and entertainment, consumers in 2021 don’t forget when brands screw things up very easily, and they’re lightning fast at pointing out discrepancies between what a brand says they’re about, and what they actually do. That said, today’s young generations are also more willing to forgive brands if they own up to their mistakes and try to make amends.

Conclusion

Whatever you may feel about the validity of people’s reactions to the Burger King Women’s Day fiasco (I personally feel like it wasn’t such a big deal), as marketers we have to understand that today’s online climate is one that holds brands and individuals accountable for how they communicate.

Gen Z and all future generations are, or are going to be, internet natives. And on the internet, brands win long-term admiration through focusing on a human-centric purpose, and by subtly doing good things in their communities. Rather than shouting about something you’re doing right, let others do the talking for you through press release-style content and online word-of-mouth.

The post The Burger King Women’s Day Tweet: What can we learn? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Setting up a Twitter Account

To open a new Twitter account for your company simply follow this step by step signup process. When that is done go to your profile settings and upload your logo as your profile picture and set up your Twitter background to match your corporate identity. Alternatively you can find a designer on sites like Behance or Dribble to design a custom background for you for a small fee.

 
In your bio section make sure that you write a short description about your company. Be as descriptive as possible and include keywords related to your product/service as this will make it easier for someone to follow you when searching for similar companies.
You can also include a link to your Facebook or Linkedin pages so that visitors will follow you on these sites as well. As an example, below is the profile description of Thenextweb.com
“International news on technology, business and culture. Follow specific channels in our Twitter lists. Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thenextweb”
Note how they are using the keywords “news on technology” “business” and “culture” in their profile description.

Increasing the number of Followers on Twitter

After setting up your Twitter account now is the time to start following some people.
The easiest way to do this is to search for your competitors and filter their followers by choosing only those that you think would be interested in your products. Let’s say you sell digital cameras, you will follow only those people that in their profile included something related to photography.
Avoid following a lot of people at once since Twitter might suspend your account if you follow too many people at once. Do it gradually.
When you start following people, some will follow you back. This is the main aim of following people i.e. to increase the number of followers.
I’ve found out that roughly 15% – 25% of the people you follow will follow you back. I usually spend a couple of hours every week following people and then again once a week I un-follow those people that did not follow me back.
The tool below will make it easier for you to spot those that are either inactive for a very long time or did not follow you back:

This process is quite time consuming, however it is much better than using any automated tools like TweetAdder that will automatically follow users that mention specific keywords and un-follow those that didn’t follow you back.
You should scan each and every profile before following and making sure that it fits in your target audience rather than following everyone that simply mentions a specific keyword related to yours. This way there’s a better chance that those that follow you back are actually interested in your tweets.
Do this religiously – never stop this process. It is key to keep on building followers.

Sharing Updates on Twitter

Now that you know how to increase your followers, let’s move on to explore the idea of generating traffic to your site using your Twitter profile.
The way you craft your post is essential. Write out potential tweets a few different times and try to think about which one would actually make you want to click on it. Not all tweets are created equal, so ask yourself the following questions before posting:

– Can you add a picture to make your post stand out more?
– Are you really highlighting the most exciting aspect of your blog post/page?
– Are there any fellow Twitter users out there who might benefit from being tagged in the post? Will they give you more exposure if they retweeted?

Also keep in mind that people are on Twitter at different times throughout the day. This means that the time that you post updates is an important factor to reach a bigger audience.
According to this infographic, the best time to tweet updates is between 1-3pm EST during week days. However you should test and post updates at different times throughout the day and find the best time where people are clicking on the links that you’re sharing.

You can use a tool like Bitly to share your updates, as it will show you the number of clicks that you get from every update that you post.
In order to increase the traffic to your site you need to post updates such as your news articles or blog posts for your followers. The best way to do this is to schedule your updates using tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer.
You can also tweet the same updates in different times throughout the day as your followers won’t be on Twitter all the time. However, make sure that you space your updates by a couple of hours.
This is a technique that Guy Kawasaki uses to share tweets with his followers. He repeats the same tweets at different times throughout the day. This way he tweets more frequently which in turn gets him a gazillion followers.

Finally – Keep posting, keep testing

Twitter can get you a lot of good quality traffic that you will really need as a start-up trying to growth-hack your way to the top. But remember: in order to reach this goal you will need to keep at it and increase your followers every week. You should also use Twitter to test the different content that you write on your site or blog.
When you share content on Twitter, make sure that you analyse and find out which articles your followers are sharing. Then, write more of those.
The recipe is simple and you can do it without any huge investments. All you need is time and tenacity.

The post Growth hacking: How to use Twitter to drive Traffic to your site appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.