Can Marketers Do Without Twitter? We Might Be About To Find Out

The first ten days of Elon Musk’s TwitterTWTR
have certainly been eventful. We’ve seen the new owner try to reassure stakeholders that the platform would not become a toxic hellscape, then promptly retweet a conspiracy theory about the assassination attempt against Speaker Pelosi and her husband, backpedal furiously (in what must have been a huge disappointment to his fans on the far right), announce a plan to turn Twitter’s verification system into a paid subscription (angering many of the platform’s most engaged and influential users), hold a conference call with CMOs that reportedly did not go well, fire half his workforce, then realize that the company may have gotten rid of workers it actually needs, start banning the accounts of comedians making fun of all this in the name of “free speech,” and discuss suing organizations like the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League for “tortuous interference” in encouraging advertisers to leave the platform.

In the meantime, analysts have measured an immediate dramatic rise in hate speech on Twitter, the reported loss of over 1 million accounts including a drumbeat of high-profile account closures, and reports of a flight of advertisers that threatens to become a stampede to the exits. That last point is crucial, because, while users are Twitter’s product, advertisers are Twitter’s customers. All the drama around the site itself can obscure the larger point that Twitter has survived this long as a business because it provides a unique value to those customers, many of whom have stuck with it despite a flurry of pre-Musk controversies.

So what does Twitter the social media platform offer marketers that they can’t find elsewhere in the ecosystem?

“Twitter’s big advantage is timeliness,” said Tania Yuki, CMO of the top social metrics firm ComScore. “Brands want to monitor the conversations taking place in real time and be able to jump in with timely, relevant content. If there’s an important cultural moment, brands will shift their spending to Twitter because that’s where the engagement is.”

Yuki says that even though Twitter’s audience represents “low single digits” of reach and engagement compared to Tik Tok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and some other large scale platforms, that ability to interact immediately and (hopefully) authentically with a global audience is something they can’t find elsewhere. She also points out that the impending “cookieocaplyse” (the demise of tracking cookies that help marketers gather data on users as they navigate from site to site) magnifies the value of Twitter, which provides data that can help marketers pinpoint customer habits and affinities.

Prior to the acquisition, brands understood their exposure on Twitter primarily in terms of managing their one-to-one relationship with customers. “Twitter over indexed as a place for customers to go if they had a concern or issue about the brand,” said Yuki. “Brands always had to be concerned about the perception of their tweets, but it wasn’t being evaluated from the perspective of brand safety [of just being associated with the platform]. Twitter was considered low risk for brand safety in terms of content.”

Despite widespread reports of advertisers pulling back from Twitter, Yuki said that as of Friday, November 4, “there haven’t been sea changes yet” and that it’s too soon to tell how any of Musk’s actions have impacted the site from a data perspective.

The real danger, as Yuki describes it, is not a loud public flight from Twitter, but a more insidious decline in the quality and quantity of engagement. That kind of paralysis can kill a platform faster than you can say “MySpace.”

“If people are not coming and creators are not sharing content, the problem will be the absence of noise. It will be silent but deadly,” she said.

If Musk continues to exude a bad enough smell around the Twitter brand through his erratic actions and divisive approach to the market, he could very well accelerate that spiral, particularly in the implementation of his proposed plan to monetize the “blue checkmark” of Twitter’s verified users – typically high-influence accounts that depend on the ability to be recognized as authentic. Verification “de-risks a profile by showing verification of authenticity,” said Yuki. “If it’s purely pay-to-play, it may not have the value.”

Even if overall numbers on the site don’t change significantly, marketers may be sensitive to changes in the composition of the audience, considering how useful Twitter can be in targeting hard-to-reach niche customer groups. “Marketers evaluate platforms based on the quality of the experience and the kinds of people they reach there. If anything changed fundamentally in that respect, it would change marketers’ calculations.”

Yuki says the next few months will be pivotal. If the company can’t reassure advertisers that it can maintain the quality and value of its audience, the spending will move elsewhere despite the unique and compelling advantages Twitter offers. For all of Musk’s invective about “woke” customers and the brands who value them, for most companies, the decision will ultimately come down to a cost-versus-benefit analysis about where to deploy social media marketing dollars in pursuit of quality engagement.

“Twitter plays an important part in certain customers’ overall experience,” she said. “There’s a lot of muscle memory for people in turning to Twitter to hear from experts or check on the culture. If marketers can no longer count on Twitter as a place to connect around those experiences, there would be a gap. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”