The last few years have witnessed a dramatic shift in the landscape of social media, especially with the decline of major platforms. Twitter, once a bustling digital town square, has devolved into a chaotic X environment. While the loss of the platform is sad for me and many others, the shift into what it’s become marks a significant CX loss. That’s because companies often used Twitter to monitor consumer sentiment, public discourse, and even as a channel for direct engagement.
In its heyday, the microblogging platform served as an invaluable tool for businesses to listen in on real-time conversations. Useful to brands in many ways, including gauging excitement over a product launch, handling a PR crisis, tracking a competitor’s missteps, and analyzing trends, Twitter could be used simply to listen or for broadcasting. Many brands used it as a digital channel for two-way engagement.
For businesses, Twitter was the ultimate focus group. A single tweet had the potential to reach millions of eyes, allowing brands to spark conversations, build loyal communities, or even diffuse controversies. Not only could companies participate in discussions, but they also had a powerful mechanism for customer service. One disgruntled tweet could be addressed quickly, turning a potentially negative situation into a brand loyalty win. Brands have never before had such a powerful tool for customer outreach.
Twitter is gone. The carcass left is called X often referred to as a "dumpster fire." The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis. The degradation of the platform – fueled by unchecked bots, hate speech, and a more radical user base – has turned what was once a vibrant space that was suitable for commerce into a toxic echo chamber. As users continue to flee the platform, businesses are losing their advertising audience, and their direct line to public discourse.
The businesses that leveraged Twitter’s real-time insights have now been left in the lurch. As users abandon the platform, the remaining voices are those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum, trolls, and bots that automate rage and misinformation. The value of the platform as a sentiment gauge has diminished to the point of irrelevance. Brands can no longer rely on Twitter to generate meaningful conversations or tap into authentic user feedback. The "fly on the wall" vantage point – once a business’s secret weapon – is gone.
Mining X for insights has become comical to most brands. Social listening – previously a powerful strategy to understand what consumers thought about products, services, and campaigns – has been severely compromised. X has tarnished the value of an entire sector of social automation tools, such as HootSuite, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr. Fortunately, Sprinklr has evolved past social monitoring to better manage all front-office functions, but the loss of insights from Twitter is still profound.
Additionally, companies that once invested in campaigns centered around hashtags, live streams, and public displays of Twitter interaction are now rethinking their strategies. Without a substantial and representative audience and the risk of inappropriate contamination have brands favoring other avenues. The whole situation with advertising is stranger than fiction. Mr. Musk infamously used profanity to tell advertisers to go away, and then turned around and sued them for doing what he said.
The loss of Twitter as a sentiment monitoring tool means companies are now turning to other established social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, but these are different environments, and often better associated with people you know. They don’t operate as effectively for spreading ideas to new people as Twitter did so effectively.
New platforms haven’t filled the void either. Threads and Bluesky stand out as the most promising. Bluesky experienced an influx of approximately nine Million users when X was recently outlawed in Brazil. Threads has potential, but it seems leashed for now — perhaps intentionally until the election is over. In an intriguing move, Threads has embraced federation. The “fediverse” is a decentralized network of interconnected social platforms that allows users to communicate across different services. But even with the fediverse, the audience is still much smaller than what Twitter offered.
The users and consumers who once had a direct line to brands through Twitter are alone again. They no longer have the gratification of having their complaints addressed publicly or the excitement of watching their favorite brand respond to them in real-time.
As businesses reckon with the loss of Twitter (and with what X has become), the void left by the platform’s downfall opens opportunities for innovation. New platforms will rise, and companies will continue to explore alternative ways to engage directly with consumers. As businesses seek new opportunities, the key will be flexibility, resilience, and a willingness to experiment with new channels. The loss of Twitter marks the end of an era, but will eventually signal the beginning of a new chapter in how brands interact with the public.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and analyst at TalkingPointz.
