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Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms?

My partner's ecommerce business spends millions a year on marketing and is typical of the type of SME that represents the bulk of total advertising spend.

Twitter/X has always been a far distant third to Meta and Google. It's targeting performance is poor, return on ad spend poor and the capabilities of the ad platform poor. Maybe for some niches e.g. AI startup it was useful but for most SME it was useless and their percentage of overall ad spend reflects this.

For large brands what it was good for was brand awareness. Nothing makes you appear relevant than being alongside the latest trends or news which Twitter excelled it. Which is why when their ads appeared alongside hate speech they were so quick to move. Because they didn't have any real money being generated with them anyway.

You can't put the Elon BS aside because it continually impacts the efficacy of ads on the X/Twitter.

A larger percentage of the ads are scams surrounding trends like NFTs because of his dictated moderation and staffing changes.

Views are amplified for himself and his preferred posters - which for all you know may land your company's logo next to Alex Jones.

> Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms?

Brand/PR/Reputation is a liability and most big enterprises will continue to optimize for diminishing liabilities by moving to more reliable platforms.

I think you miss the point of putting something aside.

It doesn't mean you have to ignore it or say it doesn't exist.

You can ask what else can be said about X besides the given topic that you are putting aside.

And he's saying there's almost no point in asking that question because Elon's way of running the company has been so impactlful to the platform that considering it without him is pointless.

That is just refusing to engage with the question on its own merits, and preferring to talk about Musk.

It is simple to think of interesting questions and topics besides Musk.

It is fine if someone doesn't want to answer it, but a respondant doesn't get to call it pointless, because objective and goal lies with the asker.

Yes.

Musk fired the majority of people working at Twitter, changed the brand, unbanned very controversial users, alienated most of the advertisers, etc etc etc. Talking about Twitter without talking about his leadership is to have a conversation without merit. What other topics are there? He owns the company. Every policy change over the past year has been his personal decision.

I don't care about Musk or find that interesting. I want to know about the current ROI for Twitter advertising, in standard marketing metrics.

I don't care about corporate policy, history, personalities, or why things are the way they are.

You seem interesting to talk to.

I can't say the same if you think Musk is the only conversation topic of merit. It is not only restrictive, but boring and has been beaten to death

Most of the major corporations who were advertising on Twitter seem to be worried about their brand getting placed next to some neo-nazi shit right now. That is directly related to decisions Musk has made. Additionally, he took it private so it's not like we can read their quarterly reports. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about this company without talking about the new owner. Any conversation that doesn't somehow relate to him is going to be incomplete. That's much less true if we were talking about Meta, or Google, or Apple. But we're talking about Twitter, which is currently in the process of being managed into the ground.

It seems like you simply cant imagine that someone else might have a different conversational topic or interest. I genuinely feel sorry for you.

It is like people that interject wokeism, Obama, or Trump into any conversation, even if you are talking about the weather. A conversation about the sunset is not "complete" or "meaningful" without ranting about what they want. They just cant comprehend someone having a different interest.

It seems almost obsessive compulsive. Someone asks what letter comes after X, and they cant talk about Y, because any discussion of the alphabet is "incomplete" or "meaningless" without starting at A, B, & C and discussing it at length. All letters come after A, so all conversations are about A.

IF you tried, can you even come up with 3 questions and answers about twitter without making it about Musk?

The “BS” label is important though: that hints that GP does indeed think it can be ignored/doesn’t exist. A retort to this isn’t unwarranted if you believe that Musk’s actions does impact ad spending.

my point is that the topic of Musk's actions and impacts absolutely can be ignored if that isnt the question you are interested in.

For example, I can ask and be interested in how the cost per click/sale on twitter compares to meta, without diving into they question of why.

That is certainly how I took the question at least.

I agree, for the purpose of scholarly dissection of the subject, it’s perfectly fine.

My point was that lining it up by calling it “BS” invites counter arguments, which is what happened here. If you’re not happy to implicitly accept the “BS”, you’ll have to address it.

Dropping the “BS” label would have led to a more focused discussion. It matters _how_ you ask a question.

I see your point and agree that clarity may have helped. I read "BS" a little differently, as acknowledgement that all of the Elon stuff is a shambolic mess.

It also seems to be the case that some people didnt just disagree with the BS classification, but fundamentally disagree that anything besides Elon is a valid topic of conversation.

IT does matters how you ask a question, but some people will reject or change the topic no matter how you ask it.

Case example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38848821

Comes off as abrasive IMO. Someone might as well reply "I don't care that you don't care" then. You're more likely to get a good response from cutting all of that out and just leaving the meat: "I want to know about the current ROI for Twitter advertising, in standard marketing metrics."

The abrasiveness picks up in your replies. It comes off as if you went in looking for a fight. I don't know if you did or not, but the quality of the response reflects the attitude in which your question was posed. In my opinion.

Right, it might read as "Musk's bullshit" or "the bullshit aimed at Musk." Either way, the ambiguity doesn't help. It might tick off both Musk-huggers and Musk-whippers, depending on how they read it.

IIRC Twitter charges a fair bit more per impression than IG/FB/etc. (like $3 vs $.50?) but they also average higher engagement/click-through's than their contemporaries, like 10-15x (again if memory serves). It's been a while since I looked at these stats though.

What I don't recall is the amount of ads flowing on each site. I do believe facebook generally has more ads happening than the rest.

The thing is you can't put it aside. People are leaving in droves, as are advertisers. At this point brands don't want to even be on X, much less advertise there. That compares _badly_ to other platforms, needless to say.

>People are leaving in droves

I sure wish they were. I think that's exactly why for this brief moment the GP wants to focus more on he business realities than the same drama that's happened for the past 6 months.

Anyone still left on Twitter at this point has clearly signaled that the terminally online nature of it is more important than anything else. IE, they are signalling that getting the most banal comments from important people the very second they make them is more important to them than getting quality content, or not supporting an actively hostile system, or doing actual journalism.

I really really don't need up to the second information about whatever Corey Doctorow is saying, as I read his books almost twenty years ago and they still seem to accurately portray his thoughts on many things, also he has a blog. Doomscrolling a tiny cachet of "important to me" people, isn't actually important or useful. You lived just fine before Twitter, surely you will do okay getting your news 24 hours behind some person who hasn't left twitter but somehow is able to sort through all the dross to pull out what little signal is still there.

Sure, I agree. And I also think that the lion's share of people prefer convenience over quality 99.99% of the time. I don't know if that's a mentality that can be changed, and Twitter captured most of that market.

You can only become the next twitter and be subject to the same flaws or try to seek out the relative minority that is seeking quality over noise.

> People are leaving in droves

I was chatting with someone recently who is still on Xitter and he was wondering why so many of his followers had recently been "suspended". I got to wondering: if a lot of people are leaving and X doesn't want that to be something the remaining people focus on are they just calling people who have deleted their accounts "suspended"?

Many censored people are coming back to Twitter/X

Twitter/X seems to have good engagement and there are active Geopolitics, Israeli/Zionist, Palestinian/Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian (NAFO), Covid, anti-MSM, anti-Disinfo, populist, Crypto/NFT, Black American, sports, and many Indian and African spaces on an ongoing regular basis, several running concurrently at many times of the day. I like that I can go into multiple spaces at different times and hear radically different perspectives unfiltered. This is why the platform appears to be getting much more sticky.

The Spaces bug where you can't hear people is the most annoying thing about it, other than the link interception.

I'm bothered by the 3 levels of subscription - the basic, premium and premium+. The premium still has ads everywhere, and the + does not, but costs more. I think both should be ad-free. I hate ads particularly when I am already paying for the service! https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-byco... Given that Premium users are supposed to see 50% less ads, I cannot imagine what kind of ad hellscape it would be if I was not at premium level. I block every ad X account I see.

It is a good place for breaking news and unfiltered data. There is still weaponization of the CommunityNotes, and active shilling and astroturfing by intelligence agencies doing propaganda online.

I have not used Grok at all so I cannot comment there

> Twitter/X seems to have good engagement

Perhaps. But not for the audiences that matter to advertisers.

Many of the people that I engage with on Twitter have been censored on other platforms, folks that are described as the Classical Left, Libertarian Left, Libertarian Right, Populists, the Antiwar types, and now it includes both Palestinian and Zionist perspectives,

I'd like to hear these viewpoints without going through gatekeeper MSM

Since I am a paying customer and I block all ads, I am not sure how much the ad stuff matters. I hate ads!

> People are leaving in droves

I am not and have never been on Twitter so I can't speak for what's happening on the platform but the places I frequent that post news that's broken on Twitter haven't stopped doing that so, at the very least, influential people are still breaking news there at the same place.

I can't help but think that the people leaving Twitter meme is wishful thinking by people who dislike Musk.

The valuation really tells the story, I think. There's no way to square "Twitter's valuation drops 75%" and "everyone is still on Twitter and just as engaged as ever". These cannot possibly both be true at once.

Sure they can. You assume the valuation is directly proportional to the traffic of twitter. It's likely more about the ad customers on twitter, and they very much are leaving in droves from what I'm hearing. That doesn't mean the users aren't still there.

I'll ask the corollary question to rein this in: where are people going if they aren't on twitter anymore? Tiktok? Instagram? It sure isn't Bluesky at the moment.

"Follow the money". And the money follows the users.

Normally, yes. But the only thing brands love more than money is good brand assossiation. And that's where Musk comes in.

Users can ignore that. Brands can't.

> People are leaving in droves

I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).

This feels a bit like saying “apart from the fact that the apartment building is on fire, why are so many people leaving it?”

If a building is on fire, there are still other facts about it that can be known or learned.

Twitter/X hasn't traditionally been cheaper than other brand-awareness ad spends, and has performed worse. The best argument for Twitter/X was always that the audience size mattered less than the audience influence.

This is why the abandonment of Twitter/X by large audience segments has been such a compounding effect. Even if they can replace 1:1 people they're losing with new users, if the users aren't the right type of demographic, ad spend is going to collapse.

It will depend on what you are looking to get out of advertising - immediate sales or engagement/awareness.

If you are an eCommerce business selling a widget then you can easily get a cost per conversion, and then it's pretty easy to optimise your spend to maximise profits (i.e. If I spend $30 on ads, I can sell a product I buy for $40 for $90 making $20). I've seen businesses with this revenue model who will spend the equivalent of c.30-40% of revenue to get the sales due to the high margins often involved.

Your conversion will depend a lot on your product, target market, the ad etc (if you are selling a business rolodex your CPC might be better on linkedin, if you are selling a selfie-stick your CPC might be better on insta etc).

The effectiveness of advertising for engagement/brand awareness is much softer, and the spend will be much more discretionary as it is harder to track. It's these ads which are more likely to fall away IMO.

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