August 3, 2023
Social Media Platforms
Working in Social Media can feel like a game of whack-a-mole right now. As soon as you’ve got to grips with one social media platform, another one pops up in its place. We’ve talked before about the app formerly known as Twitter Ever since Elon Musk bought the platform formerly known as Twitter, I thought I’d spend a bit more time on it here. for 44 Billion (Of which it is now worth a third of that value) users have been leaving in droves. This is due to a combination of factors, including his disastrous re-branding attempt to his newly announced plans to scrape all images on the site for AI, people are understandably upset. The problem is, Twitter is still (for now) the best place for brands to get across to their audiences. There are, however, claimants to the throne waiting in the wings, today I thought I’d go through these other platforms to give you a better idea of what’s out there. Admittedly, some of these have not got the same kind of reach or have seen marketers really jump on them, but as the last 6 months have shown, anything is possible in the realm of social media.
The Alternatives to Twitter
- Threads
This is the most obvious contender for Twitter’s crown. Launched by Facebook-owning company Meta just under a month ago and has seen unprecedented uptake. Part of this must be that it’s so easy to set up an account. If you already have an Instagram account, you can just hit a button and the app will populate the rest for you. Having gained over 100 million users in just 5 days, you can be sure that multiple brands have joined.
There have already been many people reminiscing that it reminds them of early Twitter before the divisiveness and toxic rhetoric moved in and people were just there to have a laugh. If you want to find out more about how brands are faring over there, you can read this interesting article over at Wired I’ll leave you with this quote that caught my attention
“… the language is friendly, trendy internet slang—with a side of self-promotion and brand-on-brand chatter. It’s a tone that clashes with the snark and cynicism that made Twitter fun—but it’s also a relief from some of the toxicity and hate speech on the bird app that left people, and advertisers, jaded. “
- Mastodon
Mastodon offers an interesting alternative to the other Social Media networks listed here. Instead of one centralised network, it is instead a series of de-centralised networks that can be linked together. There are ‘federated’ and ‘local’ views so you can still see things that people are saying globally., but the focus is on much – more small-scale community building.
Because of this, the platform hasn’t had the same attention from brands and marketers as you’d expect, but the BBC recently set up a server so maybe the times are changing.
- Bluesky
Bluesky is also an experiment in decentralisation, actually founded by ex–Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. As this piece in the Guardian puts it
(the creators want it to be) “something that could replicate the Twitter experience without placing the company itself at the centre of impossible decisions around content moderation.”
Bluesky has over 450,000 users and over 1.9 million people on the waiting list. At the time of writing, users are invited onto the platform. This has given the platform an air of exclusivity and glamour. There’s also demand of more users as the app has been downloaded over 1 million times
I hope that has helped you make more informed decisions about where you will spend your time in the future. It can feel like herding cats sometimes as a social media marketplace, with having to have accounts on all these services, but you can rest assured that sooner or later, a market leader will pull away from the pack. If you’d like to talk about Twitter alternatives, or anything social media-related, you can find the IF contact info on our website.