3 big changes for Twitter entering the age of Musk: A new direction for the platform under new ownership

After pulling for nearly 8 months, last week, the world's richest man Elon Musk finally took Twitter into his bag!

The world's richest man has acquired one of the world's mainstream social media platforms, and such a major event naturally needs to be interpreted for the vast number of overseas brands. (There is no immediate interpretation. One is because we want to pay attention to a series of actions after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and the other is to immediately release the 2022Q3 "BrandOSTOP100 Overseas Brand Social Media Influence List")

Now that Musk has been a "new official" at Twitter for a few days, what changes has he made to Twitter in the past few days? What chain reactions will his actions trigger? We will explore with our friends through today's article.

Change one: layoffs

Within hours of taking over Twitter, Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett, and the legal policy, trust and Security chief Vijaya Gadde.

Not only that, Musk also disbanded Twitter's existing nine-member board, leaving only himself as the "sole director."

(Musk retweeted media reports of his layoffs)

In addition to the large layoffs targeted at management, senior managers of product teams were asked to provide a list of layoffs based on code contributions to Twitter during their tenure at the company, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. . Engineers from Tesla will review the lists with Twitter executives and, ultimately, could reduce headcount by 50%.

As of the end of 2021, Twitter has about 7,000 employees, and it is unknown what changes such a large-scale layoff will bring to these employees. But from the point of view of Musk's contributions through code review employees, under Musk's leadership, Twitter will pay more attention to efficiency and innovation, and it is expected that the time for launching new features will continue to be reduced in the future. This may be something brands need to be aware of when doing Twitter marketing.

Change 2: Revive short video platform Vine

On October 31, Musk posted a poll on his Twitter titled "Would you like to bring Vine back?". Nearly 70% of users agreed.

Vine, a short video platform acquired by Twitter in 2012, was once popular by allowing users to upload 6-second short videos, but was completely shut down by Twitter in 2016 due to the loss of its influencers and users.

Vine is a short video platform earlier than TikTok, and a lot of short video stars have been born on Vine, such as King Bach, who was once known as the king of Vine comedy (now has 22 million+ followers on Instagram), and the US version. Papi sauce Lele Pons (now with 40 million+ followers on Instagram).

So after its fall, there are still many fans who miss this original short video application. Not only that, because of Vine's past glory, many people expect Twitter to revive Vine's influence and use it to counter the increasingly popular TikTok. Obviously, Musk thinks so too.

Musk is rumored to have personally reviewed Vine's stagnant code and asked Twitter's engineers to restart the project. How the originator of the 6-second short video can fight against the booming TikTok will also bring more opportunities for the brand's short video marketing.

Change 3: Certification

According to The Verge, after Musk took over Twitter, he asked employees to start introducing paid authentication features.

This feature is a combination of Twitter's original Blue V certification for professionals (such as politicians, celebrities, journalists, etc.) and Twitter's subscription feature "TwitterBlue". Blue V itself can provide more rights and interests to the certified person, which can only be obtained through application before, but according to media reports, Musk is preparing to charge certified users a monthly fee of $19.99 to maintain this certification mark and rights. .

However, Musk quickly "dispelled" this on Twitter - his plan was to charge Plus V users $8 a month. And today, he still emphasizes "it will cost $8".

Musk’s move has caused dissatisfaction among many users, but from Musk’s own statement, he wants to open the rights of “plus V” to everyone to increase the fairness of users, that is to say, after this, any An ordinary user can get Blue V certification and unlock corresponding rights as long as he pays a fee.

But this may mean more uncertainty for brands, because adding V can provide brands with more convenience. Once this right is opened, do brands need to change to apply for "other VIPs" like Weibo? becomes the unknown.

Epilogue

Musk's acquisition of Twitter was a protracted tug of war. At the end of 2022, we will finally see the completion of this much-discussed acquisition.

For all overseas brands, Twitter's status as an important overseas social media platform will not change. What will change will be whether Twitter will shift from an "instantly released news voice platform" to other positioning under the leadership of Musk.

As a global social media data management service provider, as a good partner of Chinese overseas brands in overseas social media marketing, we will continue to pay attention to the new progress of social media platforms including Twitter, and share our observations and analysis with you. Welcome Keep following us.