A Personal Playground for Self-Promotion and Influence
Since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter four months ago, the social media platform has become his personal playground. As the billionaire promised to restore "free speech," Twitter users expected some changes. However, many were surprised by the extent of the sweeping modifications that Musk has made to the platform to benefit himself.
- This week, Platformer reported that Twitter had made significant algorithmic changes at Musk's behest, resulting in users seeing his tweets first
- The billionaire was concerned about declining engagement after his tweet backing the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl performed poorly compared to President Biden's
- Twitter's remedy was to push Musk's tweets to the top of users' feeds, a move that did not go unnoticed by the Twitter community
Twitter's public data confirms that Musk's tweets were driving massive engagement late last year, with one tweet alone garnering over 1 billion views on Dec. 18. On a typical day in December, his tweets were shown 231 million times. However, between Jan. 1 and the Super Bowl, that number dropped off significantly, with Musk's tweets being shown only 137 million times on average. After the recent artificial boost to his posts, Musk's tweets are now being viewed around 400 million times per day, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Musk has been able to bend Twitter to his will in ways that might be less feasible at Tesla, where he serves as CEO and the company has a corporate board.
Changing The Business At Its Core
Twitter recently made a significant change to its user interface by implementing an algorithmic feed, similar to popular apps like Instagram and TikTok. This is a major departure from its previous chronological structure, which defaulted to displaying the latest tweets.
- The new feed shows a curated selection of posts based on users’ potential interests, driven by the attention economy's pressures. While some view this as a shift from Twitter's roots as a news aggregator
- In addition to this change, Musk plans to adjust Twitter's ad targeting to operate similarly to Google's search ads, which primarily use searched keywords to target ads rather than a user's activity and profile data
- Although this approach has been successful for search engines, which are used to find specific information, social media businesses have not yet seen success with it
Disclaimer
Please note that this article does not constitute investment advice in any form. This article is not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision. All investments involve risk and the past performance of a security or financial product does not guarantee future returns. Investors have to conduct their own research before conducting any transaction. There is always the risk of losing parts or all of your money when you invest in securities or other financial products. Please note that the writer of this article is not registered as a financial advisor.
Credits
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash.
