Twitter and Bad Sales Strategy

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The new leadership at Twitter made some interesting decisions over the weekend, and since that is my favorite social platform, I figured I’d talk about what’s going wrong with the product decisions over there. I honestly think this could end up being a business school case study in the future, because I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s informative about how companies can misunderstand where their own products’ value comes from. For those who are familiar with Elon’s takeover, you can probably skip the next paragraph.

Twitter has been my favorite social media platform for a very long time, I use it far more than any other platform. It is essentially the only platform I use these days (I post on Instagram, but do not spend much time consuming content on there). I was both apprehensive and intrigued when Elon bought Twitter. It’s worthwhile to note that when Elon purchased Twitter, he really didn’t want to end up owning Twitter. Here’s a brief summary of what happened. Around the spring/summer of 2022, Elon started tweeting criticisms of Twitter’s speech policies and, in his estimation, the proliferation of spam bot accounts on the platform. Twitter offered Elon a seat on their board, he declined. He then tweeted his SEC filing for an offer for Twitter. At the price Elon offered, it was a no brainer, Twitter accepted the deal. Elon then tried to back out of the deal, claiming again, without serious proof, that Twitter misrepresented the number of bots on the platform to him (as a quick aside, the methodologies Twitter used to estimate the number of spam bots would be the same kinds of sampling methodologies that a Tesla factory would use to perform quality assurance, so I don’t think he actually disagreed with the estimation method). Twitter sued to force him to follow through with the deal, Elon counter-sued, discovery began in the case, and it seems like Elon got cold feet when his text messages started coming out during discovery. Elon dropped his suit and followed through with the deal. I lay this out because while I do not doubt that Elon thought there were problems with Twitter, his actions betray that he is kind of out of his depth when it comes to social media. And I don’t think that’s surprising. Elon has been successful with companies that are solving serious engineering problems. Twitter, and social media companies in general, do not tend to have interesting engineering problems, their problems are all around monetization (ads), content moderation (making your social media platform a healthy environment for advertisers), and eyeballs (how do you make people voluntarily look at the ads).

Elon has made clear from the jump that he planned on pushing a subscription product for Twitter in order to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising, and I’m sure, in his mind, to revamp the social media business model altogether. Notably, pre-Elon-Twitter already had a subscription product that provided some enhanced user features, called Twitter Blue. Elon’s proposal was basically to expand that product, and in order to strongarm Twitter’s power users into adopting it, he was going to scrap the old Twitter “verification” system and only allow subscribers to be verified users.

In order to understand the strongarming, you need to understand the old verification system and some of the controversy around it. The old Twitter verification system was imperfect, but it was born out of some necessity. When I first joined Twitter it was common for users to impersonate journalists and celebrities on the platform, often with pretty funny results. In my experience, during critical times of the year for sports leagues, users would impersonate sports reporters, for example, and put out fake “breaking news” reports about league transactions or injuries that would get traction on the platform. More often than not, more discerning users would spot the fakes, and it would amount to no more than a bit of a chuckle. The reporters that were duped by the fake accounts would issue mea culpas to their followers for spreading bad information and everyone would move on. However, it’s pretty clear that Twitter had a possible problem on their hands. For example, in a fast moving situation like a weather emergency or a mass shooting, the risk of bad information spreading quickly was very high. So Twitter began “verifying” high profile users by putting a checkmark symbol on their accounts so that people could trust that the content was, in fact, from Barack Obama(‘s social media manager) or The US Department of Defense and not someone who just stole the profile picture and bio from those accounts. Importantly, Twitter itself was the primary beneficiary of this system. It made the platform more trustworthy, and easier to navigate for newer users.

As Twitter expanded the verification product, many of the newly verified users were journalists, and this is how some Twitter users, Elon included, started to lose the thread on what verification was. Many of these journalists were third or fourth tier writers at small outlets, not exactly Paul Krugman at the New York Times. There are good reasons for Twitter to cover the reputational risks for even small-time journalists, however, many of these journalists were relative unknowns, and some of the journalists with larger, active followings wrote for left-leaning outlets. Right-leaning users of Twitter started referring to these people as “blue checks” as an insult, implying that the check mark itself suggested some level of unearned authority for these users (this whole framing is kind of confusing, because the same free product was offered to right-leaning journalists from all kinds of outlets, but not much of this is logical). At some point, Elon started to buy this characterization of the verification system, at least publicly, and started to talk about things like giving power back to the people, and getting rid of this perceived hierarchy.

All of these users that got caught up on the verification check mark as a status symbol completely reversed the causality. For example, Donald Trump and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson already had a huge following on Twitter, the verification product helped other users have peace of mind that they were interacting with The Rock’s or Donald Trump’s real account and not some impersonator. The Rock and Donald Trump did not get any benefit from being verified, other users did, and Twitter reaped the benefits of being a more trustworthy platform. Verification, for big and small personalities on the platform, mostly came after the following, not before. Users that thought of the verification system as some kind of social media caste system thought they could gain a large following simply by getting the checkmark, and Elon was more than happy to play into their fantasy.

So, Elon began selling Twitter Blue and the accompanying verification checkmark to Twitter users, with the promise that paid accounts would get more priority in key interactions on the platform. For a few months, Elon let the platform run with both Twitter Blue and “legacy” verification. Over this weekend, Elon scrapped legacy verification. At the same time, he increased just how much Twitter tried to boost the engagement of paid user content. The results have been poor. Unsurprisingly, users that think they can gain a serious following simply by paying for a checkmark do not put out great content, so the boosted content on the platform is very low quality. Paid users are trying to get all kinds of public figures, from A-list celebrities to C-list journalists, to pay for Twitter Blue by, essentially, browbeating them. Elon and his closest confidantes are basically doing the same. It’s hard to overstate how bad this has made the typical user’s experience. For example, in previous iterations of Twitter, when you wanted to see how people reacted to a tweet, you would read the replies. In the pre-Elon version of Twitter, replies that had the most engagement moved to the top, so by some measure it was the higher quality content. Now when you look at the replies to a tweet, the paid users are the top replies. Their content is terrible, as evidenced by the low engagement with it, and often not even related to the original tweet. For most popular tweets, the replies a user immediately sees are paid accounts cajoling the tweeter for not paying for Twitter, and spam. There’s almost nothing related to the original topic.

Aside from the browbeating, some of Elon’s hangers on have been insinuating that old verified users would need the premium tier to maintain their audience. Beyond the bad sales pitch, the idea that important personalities need Twitter to maintain their audience is absurd, because compared to other social media, nobody uses Twitter.

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Elon tried forcing free Twitter Blue accounts on some of the most popular tweeters, but those tweeters do not want to be associated with this product. So now Elon has some of the highest profile Twitter users loudly denouncing his core premium product because they don’t want to be tied, in any way, with the users who did buy into it and are toxic to the platform.

The weirdest part of all of this is that Twitter Blue does have expanded features for users, and there’s probably room to develop more products to improve user experience in the paid tier. But none of that is part of the sales pitch, because Elon is kind of in thrall to the users that very mistakenly think that a checkmark next to their account name automatically gives them importance or clout.

I know this is a restatement of what we’ve covered, but I think it’s really something when laid out concisely. I’ve never really seen anything like this, and I’m not sure that there’s a confluence of factors that could make something like this happen again. We have a company whose cultural importance far outweighs its actual footprint that is trying to expand its freemium model with a product that’s probably priced too high, but that does have some value. The company has completely bought into a strange political framing of the product, though, and is now completely focused on a badge that users get upon purchasing the product, to the point where they don’t even bother vocally selling the product’s features, they are only selling the badge. It would be like the New Yorker pitching their $90 annual subscription solely by selling you on the tote bag, and not the actual content that you get over time. Many of the users who have purchased the badge are very angry at the users that have no need for it, and are haranguing them about it. The company is amplifying the haranguing, putting the worst content up front. Then the company tried to foist the product on its most important users, and those users are very mad about it. I can’t think of a situation where a company so completely lost sight of its value proposition, but in turn gained a small following that was deeply, even psychopathically devoted to the new direction.

It’s probably useful to point out that Elon’s Twitter persona, for some time, has been that of a troll, so it’s hard for me to say whether the way he is running the platform has business in mind at all, or some other motivation. He’s been a bit obsessed with elevating his Twitter presence, and at one point in 2018 was using the Tesla twitter account as a carrot to bring in edgy social media pros to manage his own account. I don’t want to say that he spent $44 billion to mold the site around what he specifically wants to be on there, but the way he runs it does make me wonder.

And all the while, the original speech problems and spam bot problems are either the same or demonstrably worse. I’m sure Elon’s working on it.