Will Twitter User Engagement Take a Dive in 2023?
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October, it’s been clear he can generate controversy and attract news coverage. However, it remains to be seen whether he can actually turn around the platform from a business perspective.
Unfortunately, most of the headlines have not reflected well on his leadership. There have been a series of gaffes such as poorly communicated mass layoffs, the pay-to-play blue tick debacle, reports of advertisers dropping like flies, and Musk’s own followers voting for him to step down as CEO.
If he was anyone other than the former world’s richest man, it would be fair to wonder whether Musk might be forced to step down rather than have a choice. Having declared he’ll honor the public vote on his leadership, but only when he finds a successor, there’s been no news regarding the matter since he made the announcement in December.
The truth is that the problems at Twitter began before Elon Musk took over, and this is reflected in the company’s lukewarm stock performance in recent years compared to other social media platforms. User and revenue growth never exploded in the way seen by Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok, all of which, of course, also have their fair share of controversies as brands.
Now, however, many are saying that the end of Twitter is already underway. Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, told The Guardian that he expects Twitter to lose 32 million users over the next two years due to frustrations with technical problems and a lack of content moderation.
What’s happening to justify these predictions? What subcommunities are most likely to jump ship first?
Core audience alienated
Social media will always have casual users who flit in and out of platforms. Most of these apps are dependent on a core audience of power users that keep engaging and creating content to draw others in.
When a platform loses users, you’d expect it to be the most casual users, but it feels like there’s a deeper problem at Twitter. The exodus is led by some of Twitter’s core users looking elsewhere and saying enough is enough.
Small businesses have traditionally considered Twitter as a key platform for them to market to customers and grow their business. Yet only 26% of small businesses chose it as one of their favorite platforms at the end of 2022 according to a recent survey from vcita, a small business management platform.
This is down from 42% at the end of 2021, which is a significant drop. In essence, among small business users, Twitter was leapfrogged by LinkedIn in popularity and is no longer in the top three social media platforms for small businesses. In more bad news for Musk, at 56%, Facebook is now a favorite for twice as many SMBs than Twitter.
The vcita survey doesn’t specify the reasons for this trend, but brand safety concerns …read more
Source:: Social Media Explorer
