After Elon Musk’s stormy takeover, tech, advertising, and media companies can smell blood in the water as Twitter users lose interest and marketing dollars.
The anarchy that Musk has unleashed may lead to a genuine change, in which other businesses flourish while Twitter declines.
For Twitter’s aggravated user base, tech companies are releasing a slew of similar products.
For their advertising dollars, businesses are courted by media outlets that offer a more “brand-safe” environment.
Current Situation
Many users have been vocal about leaving the social platform due to concerns regarding less content control, an increase in hate speech, and Musk’s professed free-speech absoluteism.
Marketers were appeased at first by Musk’s assurance that Twitter would not devolve into a “free-for-all hellscape,” but his policy declarations and postings have caused some major companies to postpone or halt their ad spending.
Using Statistics
Reuters claimed, using internal papers, that Twitter had been losing its most active users from the start of the pandemic, and this was before the sale to Musk was finalised.
However, the Verge reports that behind the scenes Twitter is boasting about “all-time high” user growth since the Musk era began.
As the firm is now privately held, we may have even less access to its stats than before, which are known only to Twitter insiders.
Alternate Social Media Platforms to Twitter
Twitter’s competitors see this as a golden opportunity to attract new users to their platforms.
In 2016, the open-source and decentralised microblogging platform Mastodon was released, and it quickly attracted many former Twitter users. An average of 11,340,000 downloads were made between October 27 and November 6, according to data provided by Apptopia to Axios.
On Monday, Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko said that the site had surpassed 1 million monthly active users, with 489,003 of those members joining after Musk purchased Twitter.
According to an interview with Time, Rochko said, “I have been working very, very hard to push the idea that there is a better way to conduct social media than what the commercial firms like Twitter and Facebook allow.”
Additional Choices
Cohost, a social networking platform similar to Tumblr, reported an increase of 16 thousand users in the past month.
At the end of October, BlueSky, a protocol for developing a decentralised social network, claimed that it got 30,000 new signups for its waiting list in only two days. BlueSky was first introduced in 2019 by Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey.
BeReal and Gas, two relatively new social apps, continue to attract a sizable number of youthful users and remain in the App Store’s top 10.
New features on competing services are being released specifically to attract Twitter’s displeased user base.
Distributing Newsletters Substack has pushed out a chat feature in the past week that is designed to lure more debates off of social media platforms like Twitter and onto its own.
A year after banning nudity, Tumblr lifted the prohibition last week. Tumblr is only an alternative to Twitter, which has traditionally been the most popular social network for posting SFW content.
The mystery here is that Twitter is dependent on marketers far more than the marketers are dependent on Twitter. Advertisers contribute significantly to its bottom line, but consumers can easily find alternatives.
A number of major firms, including General Mills, Pfizer, The North Face, and numerous automakers, have reduced or stopped purchasing Twitter advertisements. According to the Wall Street Journal, potential buyers were thinking about diverting their budgets to competing technological systems.
Musk blocked marketing industry veteran Lou Paskalis when Paskalis tried to continue a Twitter conversation with Musk regarding marketers’ worries.
A source informed Axios that after Musk took over Twitter, the professional network LinkedIn emailed marketers about the benefits of using their platform. However, Twitter’s presence remains ominous. It may be next to impossible to replicate the user communities that have formed there over the years.
Authors and journalists are only two examples of the types of users that have created extensive professional networks on the site that would be difficult to recreate elsewhere. Many marginalised communities, in particular, have found Twitter to be a vital resource (including the trans, LGB, and disability communities as well as the well-documented Black Twitter).
