As Twitter Continues to Break, Musk Seeks Answers About Declining Engagement on His Tweets

Look, when you advised me that Twitter goes to show the whole lot round, and Twitter Blue take-up will enhance considerably, and it’ll be income optimistic, and Elon Musk will win out as soon as once more, I wouldn’t dismiss that outright.

But it surely’s getting more durable to see the sunshine on the finish of the Twitter 2.0 tunnel, which appears to getting narrower and narrower the extra Elon and Co. proceed on with their plans.

This week, stories have emerged that amid a significant outage, and numerous explorations of considerations that the app is solely not working prefer it ought to, Elon Musk pulled a gaggle of engineers apart to as an alternative speak about engagement on his personal profile as an alternative.

As reported by Platformer:

“That is ridiculous,” [Musk] stated, in line with a number of sources with direct data of the assembly. “I’ve greater than 100 million followers, and I’m solely getting tens of 1000’s of impressions.”

Musk was so incensed by his declining engagement charges that he demanded an investigation, to be able to get the underside of why individuals weren’t interacting together with his each thought like they used to.

Now, after all, this might even have been an exploration of broader algorithmic points – whereas utilizing himself because the case in query, Musk may be exploring an even bigger situation with tweet attain and engagement, which may affect all customers.

However evidently, it was a really private situation for Huge E.

“Workers confirmed Musk inner knowledge concerning engagement together with his account, together with a Google Traits chart. Final April, they advised him, Musk was at “peak” recognition in search rankings, indicated by a rating of “100.” At this time, he’s at a rating of 9. Musk didn’t take the information nicely. ‘You’re fired, you’re fired’, Musk advised the engineer.

The story each appears loopy and completely believable, particularly given the best way that Elon has centered on his Twitter profile as a proxy for his total recognition – which it positively isn’t.

In the latest Tesla earnings name, Elon was requested about how his questionable tweets may very well be impacting Tesla’s recognition.

“Let me examine my Twitter account. Okay, so I’ve obtained 127 million followers and it continues to develop very quickly. That means that I’m moderately standard. Won’t be standard with some individuals. However for the overwhelming majority of individuals, the observe account speaks for itself.”

After all, many individuals are following Elon Musk for various causes, and your follower depend isn’t indicative of, actually, something. However Elon appears to have intertwined his ego together with his engagement numbers, which is probably going, partly why he purchased the platform within the first place, whereas it’s additionally why his current engagement declines are a significant concern to him.

However Twitter has far larger points than Elon’s whims.

The app suffered a big outage this week, and is experiencing ongoing issues together with load drop-outs, incorrect error messages, points with the brand new Twitter Blue, and extra.

And amid all of this, Twitter additionally must cash. Rather more, in step with Elon’s bold targets.

It’s laborious to see extra individuals seeking to pay Twitter to make use of the app when it doesn’t at all times work, and it’s troublesome to maximise engagement when customers are struggling to undertake fundamental features.

So, yeah, after all, Elon may nonetheless flip issues round, and Twitter’s numerous initiatives and experiments may all come good, and Elon would possibly simply be a genius and we are able to’t all see it.

However positively, I can’t see it, not within the case of Twitter 2.0.

And with extra advertisers turning away, and subscription take-up sputtering, certainly Elon is aware of that his personal minor gripes usually are not the main focus at this stage.

It doesn’t seem to be a path to final success. Possibly it’s all part of the method. However the ‘course of’ appears much less calculated day by day.