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TheBostonPops t1_iutd9rm wrote

Reply to comment by RobotCatCo in Ad giant IPG advises brands to pause Twitter spending after Musk takeover by mbmba

Retweets are valuable for awareness for sure, as are influencers who charge for them, but there's plenty of platforms for that. We're talking bread and butter advertising, and Twitter just doesn't have that conversion value.

I actually don't think that Twitter was that poorly run (at least, not any worse than any other tech company at that scale), it's just the value that it has is not in advertising, and it faced the same problem any other tech company at that scale does: the price of acquisition eventually catches up with everyone.

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RobotCatCo t1_iutgb2q wrote

Retweets are significantly more powerful than what instagram or facebook has as equivalents. That's because in twitter retweets appear almost as if the retweeter posted it, but the interaction goes directly to the original post, as opposed to facebook/instagram where its obviously a share and only a fraction of the interaction ends up with the original post (similar to a quote retweet in twitter).

Users are also conditioned to retweet in twitter, hence why getting something retweeted by someone big can easily make a tweet go viral, hence why you see all kinds of viral tweets by someone with like 1k followers appearing all the time.

The entire 18+ adult content community is powered by retweets alone, as they're all shadowbanned by twitter but retweeting between the 18+ community has allowed adult content creators to gain hundreds of thousands of followers and funnel into their patreons/onlyfans. All of this Twitter doesn't see a cent of, while their own ad tools are nearly useless in comparison.

Facebook/Instagram/Tik Tok are profitable, hence why Twitter is poorly run compared to them. It has models it can follow but seems to be unable to do it well. I remember when super follows released last year. Almost all onlyfan accounts use twitter as thier main funnel, so had this been actually pushed it could easily put onlyfans out of business, but there's basically been zero talk of it after its initial launch and I don't know anyone who uses it.

I know a lot of artists who have to funnel twitter users into their shops, and its really hard as twitter deboosts any posts with any kind of link or even the words that mention buy or shop in the text. So a new image post can get 100k+ likes but its basically impossible to funnel people who are interested in purchasing the product to an actual link. There should be a way for people to pay to embed a buy button on the post or something. Instagram introduced that feature a few years ago and it seemed to have worked out pretty well.

There are just so many things twitter should be doing to monetize but the platform is barely changed from 5 years ago.

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TheBostonPops t1_iutkt7w wrote

You do not need to explain how social media works to me. I literally work in the advertising industry, bud. I know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry. What you're talking about, and what I'm talking about, are completely different things.

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RobotCatCo t1_iutptmu wrote

You said yourself your company is not finding advertising with twitter to be worth doing. So how is it not badly run if it is worst than its competitors at selling ads, and it's not profitable while its main competitors are?

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TheBostonPops t1_iuu35cn wrote

We’re having a difference of opinion because of our definitions of success. You’re talking about success and conversions as they relate to the business of being a personal artist or having an Only Fans, where retweets equal conversions for sure and are super valuable, but I’m talking about success and conversions for multinational brands, where it is much harder to create actual new value. Of course there is more value and conversions for some markets and audiences on Twitter versus older social media like Facebook, so agencies like the one I work for use targeting to determine where to spend our dollars.

When it comes to how Twitter is badly run or not comes down to how we define success for their business - you’re arguing that success is defined simply by how much money they make on things like ads, whereas I’m defining success by growth of the product itself. As a product Twitter was being run pretty well, it has lots of power users with dedicated audiences and integration as a multinational brand with many other brands and plenty of potential. And, as you point out, plenty of room to grow and get better, but that seems pretty unlikely now.

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