Twitter, you were my favourite for a long time

In the world of social, platforms come and go. In the last decade, I’ve sat in meetings to discuss whether we should be signing up for Vine, Mastodon, Periscope, Google+ and Clubhouse.

Why does this happen? Because launching a platform is hard, and growing to the level you need to run a profitable tech company with developers, customer service, and a board willing to invest money is nigh on impossible. You need to be fresh, original, and capture a mass audience to prove you can keep growing over a sustained period. Nobody likes a one hit wonder, unless you’re a popstar.

It’s been almost 30 years since the first social media platform as we know it launched. Now, we have a reliable set of public-facing platforms (i.e. not dark social like WhatsApp, where conversations are private) where you can efficiently reach most consumers: X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

In 2014, I was producing blogs, eBooks and weekly round-ups advising brands on how to get on-board the social media phenomenon . Because of all this, and years of hard-earned expertise in the space, I get asked a lot by clients: is it still worth putting our marketing efforts into Twitter?

The time has finally come to say, no.

I’ve been fruitlessly championing it, believing that Musk cannot be as awful as he seems. I’ve kept a careful eye on consumer behaviour, platform statistics, and tried to gauge how publishers and book bloggers are faring from afar. Surely, one man cannot destroy one of the biggest social media platforms in the world? Turns out, yes he can.

Despite Musk insisting everything is fine and the channel is seeing steady growth in ‘real’ users, my anecdotal experience day in, day out as a professional marketer isn’t matching up. I work across all kinds of clients - tech start-ups, utility companies, publishers, retailers - and I’ve been grateful this year to take up the helm of iconic brands such as Enid Blyton on social. No matter how good the tweet, how beautiful the visual, engagement is dire.

For established brands with real people following them, you’ll still find a healthy amount of likes and shares. But if you’re a small publisher trying to be heard, or a brand trying to grow a following? Unless you’re going to pay for the Premium subscription so the bots can find you, it’s no longer worth it.

Worse, they’re actively hiding data by putting previously free tools such as Twitter Analytics behind their subscription paywall and restricting what third-party tools such as Brandwatch, Buffer and Hootsuite can access. I recently ran into this particular problem when trying to pull together a quarterly social report for a client, the data simply isn’t there. An embarrassing moment when you have to sit with a straight face and tell them you can’t actually show them how Twitter has performed, after so much time and effort spent on it.

Herein lies the problem. Twitter has proved an incredible resource for the publishing industry. It’s known as our online meeting place for connecting with trade influencers such as booksellers, bloggers, and the cool people that give you FOMO and send you sprinting to Waterstones to snag that hardback everyone’s talking about.

On a personal level, Twitter is where I forged my ‘brand’, so to speak. I’ve spent 10 years building a modest following which proved to be hugely valuable when I was launching a freelancer career. While I continue to get a lot of eyes and engagement on my content, the professional enquiries I used to get through the platform have significantly dried up. Which could be a lot of things, but isn’t helped by many industry colleagues choosing to spend time elsewhere or quit social cold turkey.

Alongside work, I also spend a lot of time chatting to people, sharing things I find funny, checking out the latest books I should be reading, and seeing what’s going on in the world. Sadly, between the bots and the Trump supporters, spending time on Twitter is quickly becoming a form of digital self-flagellation. (Side note: I just had to Google how to spell that because I require it infrequently and even Google is concerned for my wellbeing. Thanks a lot, Musk.)

The industry has been slowly slipping away for months. After last week’s news, many no longer feel they can stay, since an active user continues to support Musk’s assertions that it’s business as usual. I get that. So where does publishing go next?

Twitter as a tool occupied a certain niche in terms of what marketers and brands need from it. Let me explain:

• You go to Facebook if you want to capture the 40+ market, because once parents and grandparents joined, the younger people stopped photo-dumping 500 pics of their night out taken on a digital camera and went elsewhere. I know if I want to sell contemporary fiction, saga, crime and thriller, or ‘knowledge seeker’ non-fiction, I can reliably reach my audience there.

• You go to Instagram for the book bloggers, the cool people, the young millennials and Gen Z. But only if your assets are good enough. Once, a carefully curated Instagram feed of high-quality photography was enough, but as Meta intensifies its efforts to snap up TikTok’s market share, you also have to think about Stories and video content. Pretty much every genre works there, but literary fiction, YA and fantasy / romantasy works especially well.

• You go to TikTok for Gen Z, Gen Alpha, romantasy, and the unexpected ‘TikTok made me buy it’ successes that are impossible to manufacture. You’ll find a few crusty young millennials like me kicking about, using filters ironically, but it’s all about the 13-25 year olds. I caveat that statement with a note that TikTok’s userbase grows extraordinarily quickly and their userbase demographics’ are shifting all the time. Just because it’s young now doesn’t mean it won’t age up. Particularly given the tendency for TikTok’s that were popular 6 months ago to find a second life on Instagram Reels… which your relatives will inevitably forward to you.

• You don’t go to YouTube at all unless you’re running advertising. Because let’s be honest, producing enough quality content to keep a YouTube audience engaged as a publisher is the full-time job for an entire team of content creators who focus on nothing else. Penguin Random House does it well, and their last post was 12 months ago. Go figure.

The beauty of Twitter in this complex digital eco-system was simple, text-based content. Quick quips, rapid-fire trends, and a community that you didn’t need to be hugely extroverted to be a part of. Perfect for us bookish types who just want to talk books and waste time scrolling, but still technically be reading. Visuals are nice, GIFs especially, and hashtags can help you effectively spread the message to the right people or connect with like-minded ones.

While all the other social platforms are great, they lack the low-effort immediacy and instant shareability Twitter provided. Meta is trying to address that with Threads, and to be honest, that’s probably the safe choice for many publishers and authors looking for a quick fix. While you face the risk of getting lost in the randomised feed, which shows you anyone and everyone, it feels familiar and it’s easy for people to get started since it’s linked to their Instagram.

Mastodon was briefly trendy, but not user-friendly. If you need an engineering degree and a carefully laid out set of instructions to find the right server to hang out in, it’s too complicated for your average consumer. Discord faces a similar challenge, though it is a lot easier to get started on, it’s essentially a whole bunch of discussion forums in a pretty package, and wreaks havoc on your notifications.

If you want to push the boat out and look for a permanent new home, your current options are Bluesky, Threads or Substack.

Bluesky is pitching itself as ‘social media as it should be’ and overall, the interface and functionality does feel like old-school Twitter. It’s only challenge is it started out as an ‘invite only’ platform to create a feeling of exclusivity, and took far too long to allow people to join en masse. Social media moves fast and our attention spans are limited. Lost attention means lost sign-ups, as Clubhouse discovered in 2020.

If I were to place a bet, I’d say it’s between Bluesky and Threads for the Twitter throne. Professionally speaking, I’d say it’s time to start integrating one of these options into your social media strategy and make an honest effort to start building your audience. I’m hedging my bets on both but right now, it’s certainly easier to find other publishing people on Bluesky.

Substack’s feed feature is nice and does feel very Twitter-esque, but given the community is largely readers and writers, it’s not going to be a hub for reaching a broader commercial readership. That said for book publishers, Substack presents a major opportunity.

It’s fertile ground for reaching the tastemakers and passionate readers we need to generate that all-important word-of-mouth. After all, everyone is here because they love to read and/or write. Plus, there’s a noticeable community spirit for authors, academics, and the readers who want to connect with them.

Could this be our new industry town centre? Maybe, it depends how long it takes for publishing to recognise Twitter is a sinking ship, and invest all that hard work elsewhere. Bad habits are hard to break, after all.

Rach x