I do miss Twitter, I won’t miss X.

I’ve been contemplating the likely impact of there not being twitter for a few weeks now. Stuart Macdonald send me a link to BlueSky I’ve been enjoying the experience of using this fresh site and have started distributing invites to people I’d like to read and be read by on the “other place”.

The experience is refreshing. BlueSky is what Twitter as when I joined it – a kinder and more thoughtful place than X.

I am now tweeting in the other place – as well as here – is you wish to follow #pension updates.https://t.co/n258aVbXVX

— Josephine Cumbo (@JosephineCumbo) November 22, 2023

X doesn’t mark the spot

Elon Musk started using “bankruptcy” in the same sentence as X last week. It prompted the BBC to ask the question.

The issue is simple; last year around 90% of X’s revenue was from advertising. It is the heart of the business.

According to the BBC

In 2022, Twitter’s advertising revenue was around $4bn. Insider Intelligence estimates this year it will drop to $1.9bn.

Things won’t get much better if Musk continues to leave the senior executives of his departing advertisers with the message “go fuck yourselves” as he did last week.

Indeed the problems people like me have with X, is that we are regularly being given this kind of message – on the site.

Add to this , the stagnation of connectivity, the reduction in reads, likes and reposting and you get a picture of twitter as a site where the majority of interaction for most people is through “direct messaging”. We simply don’t want to expose ourselves to the kind of trolling that is now a feature of the site.

I still post to twitter from this blog but X accounts for less than 5% of reads in 2023, down from 10% in 2021 and 2022 and nearly 20% in 2018. In numbers, I am seeing less reads from X on my blog from any year since 2015 (despite a threefold increase in readers over the period.

If my stats are indicative, it is clear why advertisers are leaving X, if most of its users aren’t using it, then it is not serving their purpose.

The rise of linked in

The demise of X is mirrored by an acceleration in the importance of Linked In to business browsers. In 2018 , Linked in and Twitter supplied equal amounts of traffic, this year, Linked in will supply five times the number of reads to my blog than X. Linked in has now leapfrogged search engines as my single most important source of traffic.

The message is clear, business users of twitter are declining while those to Linked in are increasing. This has come as a surprise to me – I hadn’t realised that WordPress could give me this information.

While it is too early to tell if BlueSky will take on twitter’s custom, it clearly has an opportunity to fill a gap. I do not think Linked in provides the interactivity that I used to enjoy from Twitter.

What Twitter used to provide was diversity of readership. Facebook is now my main means to get to people who don’t use Linked in (mainly those outside the workforce through retirement or a disinclination to play the corporate game). For me, Facebook is a place to talk with football and boating fans and to post to steelworkers, former steelworkers and those needing help having been scammed of their pensions. X is a forum for fans (via hashtags) but it has never promoted groups. Special interest groups are well catered for by both Linked in and Facebook.

I am glad that I have diversified distribution for my blog, aware of the fragility of any media – indeed of all social media. The lesson is not to rest on your laurels or to rely on any following. That is a lesson for young influencers especially.