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

Look, for those who advised me that Twitter goes to show every thing round, and Twitter Blue take-up will enhance considerably, and it’ll be income constructive, and Elon Musk will win out as soon as once more, I wouldn’t dismiss that outright.

However it’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, studies have emerged that amid a significant outage, and numerous explorations of issues that the app is solely not working prefer it ought to, Elon Musk pulled a bunch of engineers apart to as a substitute discuss engagement on his personal profile as a substitute.

As reported by Platformer:

“This is ridiculous,” [Musk] mentioned, in accordance with a number of sources with direct data of the assembly. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Musk was so incensed by his declining engagement charges that he demanded an investigation, with the intention 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 is also exploring an even bigger challenge with tweet attain and engagement, which may influence all customers.

However evidently, it was a really private challenge for Large E.

“Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” reputation in search rankings, indicated by a rating of “100.” Right now, he’s at a rating of 9. Musk didn’t take the information effectively. ‘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 reputation – which it positively is just not.

In the newest Tesla earnings name, Elon was asked about how his questionable tweets could be impacting Tesla’s popularity.

“Let me check my Twitter account. Okay, so I’ve got 127 million followers and it continues to grow very rapidly. That suggests that I’m reasonably popular. Might not be popular with some people. But for the vast majority of people, the follow account speaks for itself.”

In fact, many individuals are following Elon Musk for various causes, and your follower rely is just not 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 greater points than Elon’s whims.

The app suffered a significant 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. Far more, consistent with Elon’s ambitious targets.

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

So, yeah, after all, Elon may nonetheless flip issues round, and Twitter’s numerous tasks and experiments may all come good, and Elon may simply be a genius and we will’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 appear to be a path to final success. Perhaps it’s all part of the method. However the ‘process’ appears much less calculated day-after-day.