Twitter rebrands to X: The Inside Scoop for you
Including our strategic take on how X would compete with LinkedIn, Tiktok, Substack and more.
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The most likely outcome is going to be the most entertaining one. And Elon Musk stays true to his words. Although, you might have already read much about Elon rebranding Twitter to X, but the strategic game here is much more complex and wide-field.
As a product builder, you should be curious to know what’s behind this? rather than just look at it as an isolated re-branding story. In today’s free Productify post, we analyze Twitter’s future paths where it could potentially be entering into battle against LinkedIn, YouTube, Tiktok ,Substack and more!
This is Product Strategy in action, and you could learn from it much more than theoretical product startegy frameworks. Pure drama and lot of predictions in today’s post. Give it a full read, and I will wait for your comments to this post for a discussion.
Agenda for today’s post:
X.com story actually starts in 1999
New Twitter competitor: Threads
X marks the coming of ‘everything app’
Twitter’s rebranding to X leaves a bitter taste for brand experts
Exclusive Strategic Take: Twitter could compete with LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, Tiktok and more
Marketplace moat: Keeping content creators on platform will be the key
The X Plan: From platform to becoming an ecosystem
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Now let’s get into the Twitter → X story.
X.com story actually starts in 1999
Although it may seem Elon Musk did the brand change of Twitter to X almost overnight (or precisely on Monday the 24th July, 2023), the story goes years back.
Let us first rewind a few months only. As per court filings, Twitter as a company had already begun its transition to X brand in April 2023 and the name to Twitter Inc. was changed to X Corp.
But X.com as a brand and domain goes years back:
Musk co-founded X.com as an online bank in 1999 in Palo Alto, California
In 2000, X.com got merged with its competitor Confinity (Confinity Inc. was an American software company based in Silicon Valley, best known as the creator of PayPal) and Confinity got rebranded to PayPal in 2001.
Elon Musk then repurchased the domain from PayPal in 2017.
"No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me," Musk tweeted at the time.
The new Twitter competitor: Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads attracts 100M users in first week
On July 5,2023 Meta launched Threads…. again (after shutting down an instagram messaging app by the same name in 2021, two years after its launch). Not that Meta has a successful track record of launching standalone apps (failures include Slingshot, IGTV and Rooms)
The strategy thinkers say that Meta decided to come out with Threads in its new form to capture the opportunity that Elon Musk created - by creating chaos on the twitter platform with tons of experimental features and knee-jerk decisions. However even for Mark Zuckerberg this will not be easy, even if Twitter continues to shoot itself in the foot over and over again, since Twitter users also have other alternatives: Mastodon, Post.news, Bluesky and more.
But the big question is: Will the noise around Threads stay or fade away?
Data already suggests its fading. According to SimilarWeb:
In a week (from July 7 to July 14) , the users went from 21 mins / day on average to just over 6 mins/day
daily active user count on Android devices dropped over 50% — from 49 million to 23.6 million — in the same time frame
However, Threads is missing basic platform features (like hashtags, trending topics and more), so we could give above statistics some discount and continue to observe how Threads evolves.
Now the race is on between two highly ambitious individuals and their egos:
Elon Musk’s continued big ambitions on Twitter → X and the everything app (read the next section)
vs.
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal ambition to build a social network that scales after the Metaverse failure - he needs to prove a point
X marks the coming of ‘Everything App’
Many fail to understand the rebranding of Twitter to X because they seem to look at it in isolation, but the answer lies in the Musk universe and also what vision he holds for the future. Elon Musk has been working towards bringing many ambitions together under a single brand X, to give some examples:
Buying of domain X.com from Paypal in 2017
SpaceX , the rocket company, already features X in its brand
On July 12th, 2023 Elon Musk announces debut of a new AI company called xAI and he seems to be positioning xAI to compete with companies like OpenAI and Google.
The Twitter CEO said in a live forum that he envisions a service that "does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface."
Source of Image: Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
In the All-In Podcast, Elon Musk mentioned that he has a vision for a service that "does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface."
Further, this week, the new CEO of Twitter Linda Yaccarino mentioned a vision for X (which is many ways is exactly how one should not write a vision statement) and it is a hotpot of everything buzzy and fancy (like a founder desperate for investor funding, not that Linda or Elon Musk need it).
Twitter’s rebranding to X leaves a bitter taste for brand experts
Mike Proulx, a vice president and research director at Forrester, predicts that X will shut down or get acquired in next 12 months
Nine days ago, Musk “tweeted” .. that the company has a negative cash flow because of a 50% drop in ad revenue plus “heavy debt load.” This is far from a position of strength from which to attempt what is essentially an app relaunch — a move that will only alienate more users and more advertisers. While Musk’s vision is to turn “X” into an “everything app,” this takes time, money, and people — three things that the company no longer has. Disenfranchised Twitter users will increasingly turn to Threads while Musk’s company continues to lose money. Simply put, X’s runway is coming to an end.
Strategic Take: X could compete with LinkedIn, YouTube, Tiktok, Substack and more
If you go by Linda Yaccarino’s tweet on the vision for X, she’s hinting at a mixed-media company powered by financial services (Audio/Video/Payments/Banking) and if we were to take hint from recent Twitter product changes, they hint at much much more. So here’s our exclusive strategic take:
As a text service only, Twitter is limited by revenue potential - mostly relying on ads revenue and user subscriptions, and even with both of these, the bottom line is not looking good right now. Here are first some observations about recent changes introduced by Twitter, and then we go into what they could mean.
Twitter recently added images, video and long-form text in tweets allowing its users and businesses to create content that can span across media formats and also further extending their ability to create relatable content.
Possible strategic directions that Twitter can take with these changes:
Become a newsletter platform for content creators (Twitter vs. Substack) This is a highly possible future path for Twitter given it has been rather harsh on other newsletter platforms such as Substack and competing platforms such as Mastodon. Twitter has been allowing creators to post long-posts that can be engaged with/retweeted and allows content creators to leverage their audence within twitter, rather than asking users to subscribe to their newsletter outside of twitter.
Following the news that Twitter began suppressing links to Substack on its platform, CEO Chris Best responded to Twitter owner Elon Musk calling the situation "very frustrating" and denounced some of the claims that Musk made about the company.
One of these claims is that Substack was trying to "download a massive portion of the Twitter database," Musk wrote on Twitter Saturday, to help support its recently announced Twitter competitor, Substack Notes.
Twitter previously suppressed links in December to competing social media platform Mastodon.
Twitter could become an infinite scroll for video (Twitter vs. Tiktok) Although this seems a far fetched bet, but Twitter is much closer than making it happening than you think. Today, you can go to any creator’s profile and scroll through only the posts with ‘Media’ option i.e all twitter posts features images/videos.
Twitter is also promoting posts that feature images and videos apparently (personal observation with my own twitter account, and also reports from aakashg) because that allows its users to spend more time on viewing/seeing content that reading a small 280 character text.
Another proof point that Twitter entering media (video/images) arena could be a threat is also the move from Tiktok launching text-only posts. Do not underestimate the Twitter vs. Tiktok battle.TikTok will now allow users to post text-only content for the first time in a challenge to Elon Musk’s beleaguered X, formerly known as Twitter.
Announcing the new post format Monday, the video streaming platform said it would broaden “options for creators to share their ideas and express their creativity.”
“With text posts, we’re expanding the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok, giving the written creativity we’ve seen in comments, captions, and videos a dedicated space to shine,” the company said in a statement.
Source: TikTok brings in text posts to rival Elon Musk's X | CNN Business
Twitter becomes THE PLATFORM for businesses to engage and post career opportunities (Twitter vs. LinkedIn)
As per Twitter, Twitter Hiring is a free feature for Verified Organizations to post jobs, feature jobs, on your company profile, and attract top talent to your open positions.
The hiring feature is part of the package of a paid business account, which means paying about 1000$/month for this feature and many more.
Twitter becomes a payment system (X Payments) for its users (Twitter vs. Apple Pay)
Twitter is already doing few things around payments - but most of it is through 3rd party partnerships such as with Stripe (for paying out to content creators through their Stripe linked accounts).
Given Musk’s background with Paypal, X could easily capitalise on its huge user base in Twitter to introduce XPay and consolidate this user base with that of Tesla and Elon Musk’s many other investments - Elon could already be sitting on a user base of >350-400 Million plus across all his companies - and offering easy payments across his portfolio companies through XPay could start with twitter
Marketplace moat: Attracting and keeping content creators will be the key
In order to execute on any of the above bets, Twitter needs to attract one side of the marketplace better than competitors - either users who visit Twitter to read content OR content creators who mainly create content.
Given it is tougher for content creators to switch platforms (As compared to a regular user), Twitter wants to ensure content creators stay on the platform and contribute. And Elon Musk’s Twitter (and now X) has already sent strong signals towards creators.
If you have a large following and subscribed to Twitter Blue, you would get a cut of the ads revenue that platform earns. Elon Musk announced this incentive early this year in February but recently many creators announced they got surprise gifts.
This would see Twitter target a number of platforms, most notably Patreon, through which creators share multimedia content such as videos and podcast episodes, to subscribers for a fixed or tiered monthly fee. Ko-fi, which is one of the leading providers of tipping services on Twitter, also has a similar service, while newsletter platform Substack provides an alternative for written content. (Source: Forbes)
The X plan: From platform to ecosystem
Twitter is called as a platform, albeit a niche one from perception point of view with its legacy focus on text-only content. After introducing media content, jobs platform, payments bets, creator incentivization and more, Twitter wants to become much more → an ecosystem.
In an ecosystem, users spend time doing their daily/weekly chores in it without realizing they are jumping from one platform to another. If Twitter introduces its own payments tomorrow, let us say X Pay, then users could pay for their groceries and read tweets in the evening without realizing they are switching platforms.
A big value of rebranding to X is also that it can allow users to feel engaged to an ecosystem of X (charging stations, cars, space rockets, media social platform and payments) rather than just belonging to ‘tweeting’ as an activity.
Creating an ecosystem makes it harder for users to leave it. Even when Meta could come up with Threads or anything else comes up in future competing with Twitter, the fact that users are married to an ecosystem of X products and services and not only ‘tweeting’ will make it harder for them to move out of X.
quite insightful observations, as always
really well written article. you covered everything.