📣🐦 Elon Musk buys Twitter. Based on my 12 years experience in social media analytics, here are my thoughts where it will be very hard for @elonmusk and @Twitter. 🧵
1. Elon Musk will have to fire 3/4 or more of @Twitter staff ASAP without alienating the remaining workforce. This will be an extremelly difficult task, as he will be largely selling it to a base of people that might not agree with his vision. It will be hard to sell the vision.
2. The Twitter (&other social media) is not an easy one. The thing that frustrated Elon with so many “fake” followers was a function of Twitter’s sign up process. Does Elon know? Did you ever try creating a Twitter account and looking at “recommendations”? The bias starts there..
3. When you compare Twitter with other social media platforms - people tend to follow more people than have connections on other social platforms. This hugely dilutes attention, and creates huge opportunities for algorithmic optimisations.
4. The feed of Twitter (&other social media) is where the bias and huge issues come from. How do you solve this? Do you stop filtering and return a real-time feed? Thats a problem for the product. Do you keep supporting reaction/reply based engagement prioritization? Also problem
5. The monetization problem could be fixed much easier. Twitter’s monetization has been crap for years. First the ad product is 5 years behind competition, they are not leveraging the biggest skills and the VIP profile of the audience..
6. Second monetization aspect is users - I would IMMEDIATELY pay to remove ads on Twitter. They are annoying, like I pay on YouTube Premium. I dont pay it for any content, I pay it to remove ads. Its a simple deal. Huge gap, if 5% of users start paying $3-4/month, you have $0.5B.
7. There are huge challenges for Twitter to also remain loved by its users. I think Elon sees Twitter as a mathmatical/science problem. Its so much more, but data/math can help. I dont understand why more data was not used around the fake users/inactive users.
8. Twitter has a huge inactive / fake base of users. But more so the inactive one. But then there are tons and tons of robot malicious / influence accounts. How do they impact the “freedom” on the platform, if you can redirect bots at any time to any subject? Huge issue…
9. Who will manage all of this? Elon just fired the CEO and plans to become interim CEO. The biggest problem I see is product & product management. The company is not moving product forward, and any of the recent changes are not having an amazing impact on it.
10. Twitter could and SHOULD be so much more as a platform. Its being used as a tool of choice for announcements, public information by politicians, journalists, etc. - this gives it huge potential to build upon a massive media power.
11. Twitter failed with its own “Login with Twitter” and platform approach. Big miss of an opportunity, as in many cases its Twitter I would trust much more than Apple, Google, and Facebook (sorry Meta) logins…
12. Twitter must start acquiring companies.There are tons of businesses it’ll need,starting with data.@elonmusk - my suggestion: Buy @emplifi_io, a company with the worlds largest social media data set&hugely qualified engineering team.Happy to brief you.I founded it.
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