Well, would you look at that:
As per X News Daily, X is currently developing yet another improvement for its account analytics tools which will provide insight into when your audience is active in the app, which will help in planning out your optimal approach for posting, engaging, etc.
Which is a feature that’s been available in various third party Twitter/X tools for years, and has proven to be effective. Yet Twitter and X have both resisted adding enhancements like this, for whatever reason, instead providing only basic analytics features to assist in account management.
Until recently, when X rolled out advanced analytics for X Premium subscribers, providing more tools for account management.
Which is a big improvement, but it’s taken so long. And sometimes, it’s just such a pain watching platforms so blatantly shoot themselves in the foot on these types of elements.
Indeed, every time that I, or really, any journalist writes critically about Elon Musk and/or X, we get a spattering of abuse and derision in the replies, accusing us of hating “free speech”, hating right wing politics, working for the establishment, etc.
It’s all ridiculous. I have no personal interest in Elon Musk’s political leanings, and if he’s in a position to pay $44 billion for a social media app, he can do whatever he likes.
My problem, as with many other social media analysts, is that we can see that what he’s doing isn’t going to work, based on years of experience watching others try out similar ideas. We can see that it’s going to fail, which is what we’ve repeatedly called out, yet any criticism, no matter how valid it later proves to be, is misinterpreted through the prism of political activism, because of the public stances that Musk has ostensibly chosen to take.
Case in point: Back in November 2022, a month after Musk took ownership of Twitter, I wrote an article which outlined the various ways in which Twitter could make money from subscriptions that didn’t involve selling blue ticks, a patently bad decision that only works to erode the value of the very product that it’s selling.
As per that post:
“Various third-party tools include in-depth competitor analysis and performance tracking, which you can’t get on Twitter itself, while management platforms like Hootsuite, which has over 200k paying subscribers, are largely used for tweet scheduling.”
Lo and behold, now, 18 months later, X is finally updating its analytics tools, with the exact features available within these third party tools, which are of significant value to marketers, and which marketers will pay to access direct from X itself.
The only problem is, many marketers have now abandoned X as a viable platform for their business.
X’s ad revenue is reportedly still down around 50%, and while X claims that 60% of the brands that had paused their ad spending in the app due to concerns around Elon Musk’s management have now come back, most of them are not spending anywhere near what they once were.
Basically, X is simply not as attractive to brands as Twitter once was, with the platform’s reputation significantly tarnished by ongoing controversies as a result of Musk’s unapologetically aggressive approach, in all aspects.
So while X has seen the light, and it is now adding more useful features for brands, it may be too little, too late, with most now at least somewhat hesitant to build in the app.
So it’s a good move, and a good update, which will have significant value for many brands. But it just depends on how many brands actually care at this stage.
