I don’t know how they messed it up so bad, but they have.

I started my journey on Twitter at the age of 12, 1 year under the required age to use it, which eventually caused my account to get into a bit of trouble (P.s. if you are asked to confirm your age on Twitter/X for your organisation’s account, make sure you put a date of birth that was over the age of 13 at the point of creation). However, the benefit of doing this, is that I have a 15-year-old algorithm that thankfully, does not show me the horrific content I’ve seen people talking about (take a look at this Reddit complaint) and instead I get silly jokes that lift my mood on the commute home.

I am one of the few personal Twitter users remaining at WildKat, and the only remaining user on the digital team, showing a downfall of the platform over the past few years.

I had given up on Twitter for music promotion a long time ago. Some analytics stopped being tracked in November 2023, and since then, it has become much more trouble than it is worth to report analytics from Twitter/X. Now, I also find myself giving up on it as my go-to social media account for personal use.

So what was Twitter/X actually good at? It has always been good for starting conversations, commenting, sharing opinions, and interactions. It was a community-focused platform that was great for building industry friendships and sharing opinions in a term coined as “microblogging”. This made it unique, as it meant users could focus on engaging with text rather than photo and video content. 

Before the new account paywall, I have recommended clients to not set up a Twitter account if they didn’t have an account, and I have slowly watched the classical and contemporary community leave the platform, their accounts still existing, but being left stagnant, as they no longer wish to invest their time into the platform.

Twitter/X is becoming more trouble than it is worth as a tool of promotion and community building. If you are part of your organisation’s marketing team who relies on statistics to explain what they are doing, or if you are a musician who relies on statistics to see if their digital content is helping with growth, the use of statistics and analytics are vital for anyone who wants to quantifiably improve over time. With these statistics and analytics now being behind a paywall, Twitter/X is now a much less enticing product, in a competitive market of social media platforms.

Like with most competitive industries, loyalty matters. This is why it has been confusing to see this paywall, along with the overhauled “verified” system, forcing organisations to pay a fee. In my opinion, these new policies punish accounts within the arts industry, who are already limited with their funding, and even more limited with their marketing budgets.

So, what is the future of Twitter/X? I honestly can’t say or predict, as there have been so many radical changes, both public and private. It’s still here to stay, but I think it’s going to continue to be a lot harder to promote anything musical through the platform.

We’ve still been seeing a few established classical and contemporary organisations use Twitter/X ads, but we suspect this is partly the limited-time deal of $200 advertising budget that is received when you subscribe to their Premium organisation subscription (the GOLD verified tick, which costs $200 per month). If you’re part of a particularly well established organisation who are able to spend $200 per month on one social media account, this is still an option, especially since these well established organisations still have a significant following, and years worth of work building this audience would essentially go to waste.

So where does that leave the rest of us?

• If you already have a Twitter profile, don’t delete or abandon it if you don’t want to, as there is still an audience on there, and it means you won’t need to pay to set up an account in the future.
• If you don’t have a Twitter profile, don’t bother setting one up (for now and the foreseeable!), unless you have a significant marketing budget to get enough value out of a premium subscription. 
• If you have no interest in Twitter/X, but have read this full article anyway, THANKS! Sit back and see if it continues to crash and burn.

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