The billionaire is stepping up efforts to transform Twitter and make it profitable.
Elon Musk is in a race to transform Twitter.
The serial entrepreneur is seeking to discredit his detractors’ hasty announcement that the social network died when he became its owner on October 27.
The billionaire must also make the microblogging platform profitable fairly quickly because he has transferred to the company’s balance sheet the $12.5 billion of debt owed to seven major banks to finance the deal. Twitter cost him $44 billion.
The path to financial success for Twitter, which Musk considers the town square of our time, is through rebalancing ad revenue and subscriptions.
Through the second quarter of 2022, the date of the most recent official data available, advertising revenue represented 91% of Twitter’s total revenue.
The mass exodus of advertisers after Musk’s arrival has weakened the platform somewhat financially, the serial entrepreneur said last November. In order to become less dependent on advertisers, Musk has been working to make the platform attractive to creators and users.
He hopes he won’t have to woo advertisers anymore. On the contrary: ultimately, he wants them to approach the platform in search of its users. To do this, Musk is undertaking multiple initiatives: removing as many bots (fake accounts) as possible; add new features and functionality to encourage users to be more active on the platform; and encourage creators to create more content.
Musk blocks his Twitter account
Twitter has thus launched a new version of Blue, Twitter’s subscription service. Blue’s price has also increased to $7.99 per month for non-Apple cell phone owners. (AAPL) – Get a free report iphone Subscription is $11 for iPhone owners. This service entitles its subscribers to a blue checkmark indicating that their identity has been verified. They can also edit their tweets and increase the visibility of their messages.
The billionaire remains attentive to user suggestions for features to add to Blue and the platform in general.
And it is in this context that he has just announced that he is carrying out an amazing test.
Musk has decided to make his account private and test the theory, advanced by some users, that a private account greatly improves owner reach.
It all started with a comment from the popular right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which claimed that the number of comments it saw increased after it made its account private.
“Put my account on private because apparently that’s the only way people will see your tweets,” Libs wrote on January 31.
And in a subsequent tweet, Libs of TikTok directly challenged Musk to ask him to explain why and how.
“Wow… these comments… @elonmusk what’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong,” Musk responded on February 1.
“Something fundamental is wrong,” Musk said in another tweet when #make your account private began trending on the platform.
The day before it was Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing political commentator, who indicated that he had tried the trick. He wanted to see if making his account private would increase the number of views on his tweets.
He wrote two tweets, one public and one private.
“The results are in,” Cheong announced later. “Setting your account to private vastly improves your reach by a factor of 5x. Zero algorithmic interruption.”
“I also got about 20 new followers in that 5 minute period. I don’t know if they are bots,” he added.
Faced with a deluge of similar comments, Musk said he would test the theory himself for 24 hours, and made his account private.
“I made my account private until tomorrow morning to see if they see my private tweets more than the public ones,” the billionaire, who has 127.7 million followers, said on Feb. 1.
What will Musk do next?
This decision means that only Musk’s followers can see the messages posted by the billionaire, but they cannot react to his tweets, commenting or retweeting, as they would with an unprotected account.
As for Twitter users who don’t follow Musk, they should ask him for permission to follow him until he unlocks his account on February 2. The tech mogul needs to agree to them before they can retweet and comment on your posts.
Musk’s post making his account private received almost 521,000 likes in the latest revision. It has been viewed almost 20.5 million times, but has received no retweets or direct comments.
The question is what the billionaire will do if his experience confirms the theory put forward by users of the platform.
The reactions of many users of the platform expressed surprise that Musk took over the exercise.
“It’s really hysterical that Elon Musk locked his account to test the theory that private accounts see better engagement,” one Twitter user commented. “Twitter’s algorithm is in such bad shape that the CEO has to do field experiments instead of, you know, an engineering department.”
