Does X Mark the Spot for Twitter?

Has Elon Musk found the ‘X’ Factor in his mission to rebuild TwItter, or is this a hasty, half-baked rebrand that will kill the brand for good? Time will tell if he has said ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ too soon…

Like many in the marketing and PR world, I have been following and watching, with morbid curiosity, as the drama has unfolded in the Twitter-Meta-verse in recent weeks.

Lured by the promise of a more positive Twitter 2.0, and the idiot proof sign-up process, I was amongst the 10 million people to sign up to Meta’s new Threads app within its first seven hours.

Part occupational need-to-know, part nosiness fuelled my 3am scrolling that first night. It felt like Twitter in the good old days; the days before the trolls and the bots, when live-tweeting funny one liner TV reviews and hot takes was a sort of virtual Gogglebox Hunger Games.

For a fleeting moment I was reminded of those joyful days back when I first joined Twitter in 2009, when I connected and found common ground with strangers, making ‘Twitter friends’ that on occasion morphed into real life friendships. Back when it was fun and you didn’t feel like you were shouting into the void, whilst watching people tear each other down.  

For all its ‘Twitter light’ look and feel, Zuckerberg, Mosseri et al have more than a few kinks to work out with Threads. The novelty of brands like Channel 4 and ITV bantering with each other, and the playful Twitter bashing soon wore off for me.

Despite giving you the option to automatically follow everyone you follow on Instagram, finding content from people you know – and want to see – in your feed is like picking a virtual needle from a haystack. Why? Because people aren’t ‘threading’ their thoughts with the same vigour they tweet (or used to tweet). There are no hashtags to help seek out the content you’re looking for. And meanwhile, Instagram reach is through the floor.

For all its faults, and the dumpster-fire toxicity of recent years, many of us (mostly Boomers and elder Millennials) still carry a torch for the Twitter of old. We have been holding out for a story of redemption and renewal, patiently waiting for that chipper little blue Twitter bird to morph into a phoenix and rise from the ashes. Alas, now we have ‘X’.

Having worked on large-scale rebrand projects and associated marketing and communications campaigns for brands including the Belfast Giants and the Belfast city brand, I can tell you one thing for certain: you can’t smack a new logo on your social avatars and say ‘job done’ when it comes to repositioning a brand.

Brands are more than logos. They are living, breathing things with complex ecosystems. Building and growing a successful brand today, where people buy into your vision and are compelled to come together by a tribal sense of community and belonging, is the tightrope walked by brand managers and marketers the world over. Build trust and loyalty and followers become fans and advocates as their identity becomes inextricably linked to yours. Let them down and they’ll become your harshest critics.

Love it or loathe it, brands don’t come much bigger than Twitter. Think of the millions of websites with the iconic Twitter bird in their footers; all the embedded tweets; the business cards and email signatures with twitter handles. Eradicating Twitter is a task of gargantuan proportions, evidenced by the lacklustre roll out thus far. You still have to hit ‘tweet’ to share your thoughts; the homepage icon is still a birdhouse… I could go on.

But more than the logistical headaches posed for Twitter, marketers and social media managers, Musk has a bigger challenge to overcome. As does anyone seeking to make a platform that will be a serious challenger.

Twitter is part of the cultural zeitgeist; and tweeting is now part of our vernacular. So, whilst Musk is clearing house and changing the guard, he needs to bring us inside. To ‘win Twitter’, he must move beyond his maniacal madman persona, sharing fleeting abstract thoughts and share his vision. He needs to convince us that there’s something bigger and better to come – a space worthy of our increasingly divided attention.

The lack of any discernible communications strategy is really starting to show. With the almost complete distruction of the Twitter comms team, It’s no surprise that this rebrand appears half-baked and hastily rushed through, lacking the cohesive strategy, rigour and preparation you’d expect for the repositioning of a major household brand.

But perhaps that is by design. There can be little doubt that there is more to this than meets the eye.

X might be a new concept to us. But it’s not new. At least not to Musk. This article by Guardian global technology editor, Dan Milmo provides better context than I will ever get through in the limited space I have left here, but suffice to say, this has been in the works for some time.

So, whilst it might appear the Elon Musk masterplan has been written on the back of a Post-It, time will tell whether a strategic grand plan has been hidden in plain sight all along.

I’ll be watching – tweeting, ‘X'ing’ and ‘threading’ – while this wide ride continues. Will you?