Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Twitter is No Longer Social Media—What It Means for Your Brand

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 396

Share episode

Twitter has always been a major player in social media, driving traffic and engagement for businesses. But things, as you well know, have changed. In this episode, I reveal why I believe Twitter is no longer a true social media platform and why I now classify it as "political media." Using my own data and observations, I break down how Twitter's algorithm prioritizes political content over business conversations, why engagement is dropping, and what this means for marketers. Most importantly, I share my advice on where you should be focusing your time and resources instead. If your brand still relies on Twitter for visibility and traffic, this is an episode you can’t afford to miss.

Learn More:

Speaker 1:

Twitter is no longer social media. Find out why and what you should do next on this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, Because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 396 of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. I am your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer. Today is a solo episode. For those of you that are longtime listeners, you know that I like to divide these up between expert interviews and my own thoughts based on my own client work, work on my personal brand or whatever I think needs to be said, and this is something that's actually needed to be said for quite some time, but I didn't have the data to back it up. But now I do. So here we go.

Speaker 1:

Twitter is no longer social media. What I would call Twitter instead is political media, and I think a lot of people might have thought about this, but nobody is talking about it. So I want to be the one to talk about it Now. As you know, I steer very clear politics and I am by no means saying I am on one side of the political spectrum or another, but I use social media for business, for networking, right, and I like to connect with other creators, other businesses in the space, follow their articles, engage with them and engage with influencers. What have you so? On a LinkedIn, on a Facebook, on an Instagram, on a TikTok, I am able to do that, and on those social networks we have algorithms, and while a lot of content creators complain about algorithms, the algorithm doesn't have any emotions. The algorithm is not programmed based on biases. The algorithm just wants to show the ideal content to the ideal person, and it is our job as content creators to be able, even whether a business or a person, to be able to give the algorithms the right content for the right people, so that our content is displayed to the right viewer. Right? I truly believe the algorithms are always looking for content to show everybody, and that's why people can come out of nowhere and become pretty big content creators overnight.

Speaker 1:

We've seen this lately with YouTubers who started talking about AI, and a lot of people were looking for information. They were there first, and now they have subscribers literally in the hundreds of thousands. So I mentioned this because this is the way that social networks normally work. You have a for you feed, and TikTok is a great example of a for you feed that is really tuned in to what you're interested in. Right? It doesn't seem to veer off it whether or not you're following someone, and I think this is the key thing that TikTok introduced. Was this era of recommended media, that it is introducing you to content that it has a pretty good idea you think you'll like. Youtube also does this. In fact, we can see that Google has always been doing this, trying to understand your search intent, what you're looking for. So now we have Twitter, and I still refuse to call it X. Obviously it's calledX today.

Speaker 1:

Twitter, as you know, if you've been a longtime listener of this podcast, twitter has always generated the most or second most traffic to my website, neilschafercom, consistently since the early days and even up until last year, it still was number one. Last year, I believe I don't have the date in front of me but I believe it was surpassed by Pinterest, as Pinterest stopped introducing so many videos, realizing a lot of its users still prefer static pins, and started introducing more static pins. And I will say that sometimes algorithms do have biases towards content formats. We see this with LinkedIn polls. Right, there was a time when they really wanted everybody to engage with polls, because everybody was engaging with polls until it was too much, and then people started pulling back and the algorithm pulled back and then they introduced something else. So, yes, there are biases, but not in the actual content itself, until we come to Twitter and now X.

Speaker 1:

So what's happened with Twitter is that for some of you, you might've seen it several months ago, after Elon Musk bought it out, but when you went to your home feed, you saw all these tweets from people you didn't follow, so you had a For you page that was automatically created. So, instead of seeing the people that you follow, you immediately were seeing a For you page, and a lot of people were confused, like my wife included, and I had to explain hey, this is like it's like a For you page on TikTok, and I think that you know Elon was definitely trying to mimic what you see there of recommending content to you. But that's where the similarities end, because the content that was being recommended inevitably came from Elon Musk himself, or content about his companies SpaceX, tesla, things that I do not follow, nor have I ever showed interest in, whether it is a content creator or content around those subjects yet they are still shown. Imagine if you were on Facebook and even if you don't follow Mark Zuckerberg, all you saw were his posts in your For you feed. Or the Chinese owners of ByteDance all you saw is their content in your For you feed. I still remember and I talk about this a lot in my books and my speeches of visiting Facebook headquarters.

Speaker 1:

It's got to be like a decade ago and they were saying, right after they bought out Instagram, when Instagram didn't really have its own little office yet, and they were saying look, the newsfeed is the lifeblood of our company. Once people start tuning out of the newsfeed, we've lost the battle. We become a MySpace, we become a Sun Microsystems, which is why if you read digital threads when you leave the Facebook headquarters, or at least back then, they still maintain the old Sun Microsystems sign as a reminder to every employee not to become a dinosaur in the industry. But Twitter's a different beast because, even though I show no interest in these topics, it continues to show these topics. It continues to show trending topics that are related to, I think, less of what I'm interested in or what are trending and more of a bias in the algorithm. And the bias is clearly a political bias, for lack of a better word, because even if I engage and I've been experimenting with this the past week I've been overly engaging with the other side of the political spectrum and, regardless of showing the algorithm this interest, I am still seeing posts in my feed from the absolute opposite type of content. I'm still seeing posts from Elon Musk, donald Trump, marjorie Taylor, greene, and if you're a fan of them, that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

Like I said, I am not on social media for political reasons whatsoever. I'm on it for business, I'm on it for networking. These are conversations that I don't want to see on my feed. I see enough of it in the news, right? I talk about it with my friends, with my family. It's just not the place for me. But no matter how much I instruct the feed, I just can't get rid of it. It's interesting because Elon also had this new rule a few months ago that even if you block someone, they can still see your profile. So you can block their content from not appearing in your feed, yet they can still see you if they find you and want to find you.

Speaker 1:

So it's turned into a weird place and I think after the elections, I've seen this accelerated. I've seen this accelerated. I've seen this type of content and I look in my For you feed of this very political content. People that I've never heard of that are one-sided. They have the blue checkmark because you can buy it. They have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of followers. They don't have, like, a LinkedIn bio.

Speaker 1:

Who knows how they acquired these followers, but there's a lot of people like that, and it brings me back to the days of, like fake followers on Twitter and bots, and I thought we were trying to get rid of that, but I see more and more of this, right. So, from a business perspective, right, this is not a political podcast. I'm not trying to take one side or the other. I'm trying to give a very, very objectionable perspective on what has happened there. But, inevitably, if the algorithm is biased towards political content, well, what happens to our business content? What happens to people that aren't interested in it? Well, they're either going to tune out, like my friends at Facebook predicted.

Speaker 1:

Many years ago or you can keep doing what you're doing, but your visibility for your content is inevitably going to go down because the political conversations that I strongly believe, those that operate Twitter really do it as a mouthpiece of just seeing the content that is in the for you feed. That that is the strategic direction, the strategic bias of the algorithm, that it has become political media. It is no longer social media, and someone has to say this, and I'll be the first to say this, Even if you agree with what others are saying, the business content that you're publishing right, that your brand is talking about, is going to lose visibility. Now, Twitter still remained as my number two platform throughout the year. I was posting less on Twitter, but I was still posting. But before I recorded this, I had a hunch that if I say it's true and I've been posting the exact type and amount of content, same frequency on Twitter for the last several months, at some point I'm going to see a decline. So I already saw the decline from number one to number two. But lo and behold, I go into December and January and now both LinkedIn and Facebook are generating more visitors than Twitter. And that, my friends, I want to say it's a first, I mean, with 220,000 followers on Twitter, that is definitely a first, Understanding the way the Facebook algorithm works and the fact that I am not posting personal, I'm not on my personal profile, I'm not publishing blog content, right. The only way that people are getting to my content is either through my Facebook page, which doesn't get a lot of engagement, or they are finding you know other ways, through user generated content, other people talking about me. But nevertheless, right, If Twitter goes to the number four position, it begins, from my perspective, to be a marginal platform. Right, and the reason why I prioritize this? Because I saw the ROI, I saw the traffic, I saw the conversions in terms of you know, people contacting me for inquiries, what have you?

Speaker 1:

But now that it's at this point, I can now confidently say it's time to wind down Twitter. Now, I will still be on there at a very, very minimal, not spending a lot of time there. Obviously, I've done my data experience, I have the information I need to prove this point right, and I don't like to be part of someone else's political machine, regardless of what side they're on. So I choose to really well disconnect for their greater part. Now there's a lot of people that have disconnected from Twitter. They've gone to Blue Sky, They've gone to Mastiodon, They've gone to Threads and, to be honest and I am on Threads should follow me there, Neil Schafer, obviously but none of those platforms come anywhere close to what Twitter was in the heyday. And I know, yes, there's some great people there what have you.

Speaker 1:

But from a business perspective, this is a digital marketing podcast. Right? I am telling my clients today, you do not need to be on X. In fact, you shouldn't be on X, because you're just not going to get the visibility. Twitter ads I've already thought. You know, since they made this major shift in the advertising platform about a decade ago, I used to see better ROI on Twitter than I did on Facebook. Well, those days are long gone too. So I think the value of Twitter for businesses is very, very small right now.

Speaker 1:

Should you be on blue sky? Should you be on mastiodon? I don't think so. Should you be on threads? Yeah, I mean, I would be on threads as much as I'm on X. I would have a very, very minimal presence there. But I'll tell you what all the time, if you spent any time on Twitter, you can now spend that time on platforms where there are more people, where you can have deeper conversations about broader topics, right, Relating to business and relating to networking, or whatever you're doing on a LinkedIn, on a Facebook, in Facebook groups, right On Instagram, even on TikTok. So that my friends is.

Speaker 1:

My recommendation is the time invested in X. You invest it in the other platforms, you invest it in the content platforms, you invest it in the content creation, you invest it in engaging with people, the creative side of marketing that AI cannot replicate. And I want to keep this real, simple and short. Right, If you've been on X, there's no reason to like completely unplug. I would keep your profile there, keep you know, keep publishing content there, but I would really monitor how well or how not well that content does over time and make a decision Because at some point, if the way the platform is running continues, you know it may be a platform because it's no longer social media, political media. It may be a platform that you just don't want your business to be associated with or you yourself personally associated with, Because, remember, as people, as businesses, we are all here on earth to make this a better place when we leave At least I am, and therefore all of the actions that I do add up to that.

Speaker 1:

If I am on that platform, is it in some way helping the world becoming a better place? And if I don't think that's happening, then I am going to unplug. And this is a conscious decision that every person with a moral backbone, every business that has a mission statement, a culture, a policy, you choose where to spend your time. You choose what content you want to upload to the platform, which then gets fed into their AI. Inevitably. You have a conscious choice in this. So wherever you publish content, wherever you spend ad money, you are basically investing in that platform, and that's where we all, at some point, need to make a decision on all of this. So for me, after these data experiments and then seeing the actual data of Twitter dropping below that, which means there's just not much business ROI remaining, for me the decision is easy I am going to just shift more and more time, more and more energy to the big three Facebook, linkedin, instagram. Funny story I just upgraded my iPhone pro to a 16 from a 15. And obviously, after upgraded, I can no longer download the TikTok app, so I can still publish the TikTok. I haven't tried to access it in the web. I don't think I can either. I just can't engage if you engage with my content there. So if that's you, I'm really sorry, but hopefully I'm still able to publish there. You'll have to tell me. But yeah, I just want to lay it out there because I think it needs to be said, the air needs to be cleared. And it's funny because I was in chat GPT. I uploaded the titles of the last year of episodes and I asked chat GPT hey, what are some episodes that, if I am a listener to the your digital marketing coach podcast that I haven't covered? What are the content gaps? Right? And so I had a laundry list of topics I was thinking of covering today from that conversation, but because I wasn't inspired to talk about anything else until just the last 24, 48, 72 hours on X made me think you know what? This is a topic that needs to be talked about. This will probably be my last episode on X, right, and you'll still see me blogging about Twitter on my blog, because there is still search demand and I still want to educate people. But in terms of the hot digital marketing topics, you will not see in my newsletter any news about X. You'll not see, you know, on this podcast, me really talking about X, because right now it is not in my recommendations of best practices for channels where you or your business should be investing your time, your energy and your ad budget.

Speaker 1:

So what do you think? Do you agree, disagree? I would love to hear from you. Feel free, you know, take a screenshot of this podcast, tag me, write a review. You know, whatever, I really want to make this a conversation because sometimes when you go out on a limb, maybe I'm not going out on a limb, maybe you're all green, you're all not in your head, maybe you're all saying, neil, what are you saying? I don't know, but I won't know until you let me know. So I'll be really curious to know what you think. Please, like I said, tag me, neil Schaefer and all the socials, neil, at neilschafercom, you can email me. You can also go to neilschafercom, slash contact and send me a message over the old contact form.

Speaker 1:

But that's, it for another episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neal Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastnealschaefercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at nealschaefercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach. Digital.

Speaker 1:

Marketing Coach.