TheBostonPops

TheBostonPops t1_iuu35cn wrote

We’re having a difference of opinion because of our definitions of success. You’re talking about success and conversions as they relate to the business of being a personal artist or having an Only Fans, where retweets equal conversions for sure and are super valuable, but I’m talking about success and conversions for multinational brands, where it is much harder to create actual new value. Of course there is more value and conversions for some markets and audiences on Twitter versus older social media like Facebook, so agencies like the one I work for use targeting to determine where to spend our dollars.

When it comes to how Twitter is badly run or not comes down to how we define success for their business - you’re arguing that success is defined simply by how much money they make on things like ads, whereas I’m defining success by growth of the product itself. As a product Twitter was being run pretty well, it has lots of power users with dedicated audiences and integration as a multinational brand with many other brands and plenty of potential. And, as you point out, plenty of room to grow and get better, but that seems pretty unlikely now.

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TheBostonPops t1_iutd9rm wrote

Retweets are valuable for awareness for sure, as are influencers who charge for them, but there's plenty of platforms for that. We're talking bread and butter advertising, and Twitter just doesn't have that conversion value.

I actually don't think that Twitter was that poorly run (at least, not any worse than any other tech company at that scale), it's just the value that it has is not in advertising, and it faced the same problem any other tech company at that scale does: the price of acquisition eventually catches up with everyone.

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TheBostonPops t1_iusu7xk wrote

I mean, as someone in the industry, most clients don’t even think about that, even when things are bad, because they have no idea what they’re doing, which is why agencies usually have to advise them. They only really think of things in terms of money and return. If all the Nazis online were buying Coca-Colas all the time they’d probably still want us on the platform, regardless of the aesthetics. I wish it was the way you described though.

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TheBostonPops t1_iurjjgr wrote

In advertising, when we put money into anything we expect a return on that investment. Depending on the type of campaign or ad this can be measured in a lot of ways, but most commonly this is measured by conversion: I.e, how many users who see the ad CLICK the ad and then CONVERT into actual customers for the client by purchasing whatever it is they’re selling or signing up for whatever it is they’re pitching.

Long story short, users on Twitter largely don’t click ads or convert to actual customers, so Twitter is largely used for awareness campaigns (where success is measured in VIEWS or IMPRESSIONS not actual conversions, and are expensive), which are not very lucrative when the site is constantly going down the toilet.

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TheBostonPops t1_iuq15tk wrote

This is pretty big, IPG owns a lot of large ad agencies with huge clients so this will have a downstream ripple effect. To be honest, a lot of digital marketers have been pushing their clients to divest from Twitter anyway - as there’s not much conversion value - which is why this was such a bad acquisition in the first place!

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