Navigating Uncertainty as a Content Creator on Twitter
This story was originally published in the Cereal Blog’s Breakfast Chat series in January 2023.
Social media is often the number one strategy for content creators and businesses in reaching new audiences, communicating with their community, and monetizing with advertisements. With Twitter’s recent takeover, there’s a lot to say that’s already been said, but suffice to say it’s bringing different levels of uncertainty into the lives of content creators everywhere.
What is happening at Twitter?
Twitter went private in late 2022 with a purchase by Elon Musk. A fairly controversial figure on his own, but love him or hate him, undeniably he has shaken up both the public discourse and product offerings on the platform quite substantially. We aren’t here to comment on what this means for the future of the platform, or our democracy, or social media and independent conversation as a whole. That’s a huge can of worms, and a lot of it is speculative and unnecessary to how it impacts content creators running their business today.
What we’ll focus on instead is how to look at this change as a content creator in 2023 faced with uncertainty.
Social Media’s role in a creator’s toolkit
There are three goals* that creators achieve in using social media like Twitter:
1. Acquisition — Using them as an audience acquisition channel, meaning that they focus on gathering a following in order to redirect that attention towards the engagement on their content, in other places like YouTube, Twitch, their own newsletter, website, or blog.
2. Notification — Using them as a direct notification tool, amplifying those existing platform’s ability to notify their fans of new content, complementing email notifications, YouTube notifications, and so on.
3. Engagement — Using them as a community engagement tool. Giving frequent updates to their fans in short form or images so that they are engaged makes it more relevant when you want to promote new content.
* Twitter also (sometimes) does monetization, like through their short lived acquisition of Revel, and sure to launch premium tweets at some point, but as that’s not a prevalent use case we’re leaving it out of consideration for now.
What Twitter’s uncertainty means for creators
When content creators talk to us about the uncertainty in Twitter’s latest phase of turbulence, they mean their approach towards the above items are at risk. Twitter is incredibly effective place to acquire, notify, and engage your fans.
The impact of Twitter on creator’s ability to continue to achieve those goals is quite simple. The existential platform-wide conversations focusing on its own leadership can make it harder for creators, as audiences have their attention divided or distracted by these conversations. Additionally, some users are using the platform less, or disengaging entirely. The last concern is the biggest, what happens if Twitter disappears overnight (probably unlikely, but still)?
It’s a good thought experiment because it’s an opportunity to reflect on how you acquire, notify, and engage your community overall. The biggest risk for creators that are overly dependent on one platform is whether they will be able to access their community if their key platform disappears overnight. How will your fans find you again? And how will you find them? Social media platforms lock businesses and creators in by not allowing users to access emails directly, so you will be able to export a user name and Twitter handle. The same goes for YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, etc.
What content creators should do to protect their business
1. Diversify! — Creators seeing this risk are adding alternate handles on other platforms such as Instagram or Mastodon. Twitter recently marked marking Mastodon links as dangerous but have reversed that well thought out policy. Members of the Cereal team are a huge fan of Mastodon as an approach to Twitter alternatives, so much so we’ve added it as a footer social link option on all the sites (I promise our product updates are usually more exciting than this).
2. Capture! — Cutting to the chase, email is probably one of the most consistent ways to reach your users. Using a email capture tool lets you build a list of your fans that are platform agnostic and you can reach in case of a rainy day in San Francisco. Twitter acquired and offered Revue that would support this, but they just shut it down. Whether for this reason or not, shutting it down certainly makes it harder for creators to capture emails of their fans and take the conversation elsewhere.
3. Own! — Maybe you’ve guessed it at this point (gold stars all around), but creators best positioned to weather this storm are the ones that have their own website their users can signup to, stay in touch, and engage with all of your content in the same place. This gives creators the added benefit of control over their future, and an email list that is up to date and works for them. While it might seem daunting to some, the barrier to owning and running your own content and membership site as a creator has never been easier. Any creator can create and launch a Cereal site under a minute with their content and brand, and be ready to bring on their fans (and export them if they ever need to).
Any way you choose to adapt to keep your ship upright (Dear reader, I think we both just realized we walked into a nautical theme), this means rethinking your social media into predominantly an acquisition channel for bringing users to a system you control.
Your goals around notification and engagement need to be operated in a way where you control as much as possible. That way you can be confident that you can run your business if one social media platform suddenly can’t serve you and your community effectively.
