Last week, users of Elon Musk’s newly purchased Twitter were able to pay £6.85 ($8) a month to verify and officiate their accounts with ‘blue ticks’.
People and pranksters alike were capitalising off the back of the change by mimicking big-brand Twitter profiles, producing seemingly authentic accounts and then tweeting out false pieces of information.
While Valve and Apple were among a raft of brands impersonated, a fake Nintendo Twitter account titled ‘@nIntendoofus’ also trolled the social media app by tweeting an image of Mario sticking his middle finger up.
Can't imagine why all the advertisers are pulling out of Twitter lmao pic.twitter.com/pg55WXkxhS
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) November 9, 2022
The Twitter impersonations even caused insulin maker Eli Lilly’s stock to plummet by the billions – from £309.84 ($368) per share to £291.32 ($346) per share – after a false tweet read: “we are excited to announce insulin is free now”.
Elon Musk has since u-turned on the feature and removed the ‘blue tick’ subscription, writing on Twitter that “Blue Verified” will be relaunched on 29 November to ensure that it is “rock solid”.
To add to this news and the mass layoffs of over half of the app’s workforce, over the weekend Musk not only reinstated the previously banned Donald Trump and Kanye West back onto the platform, but Twitter’s copyright system also fell apart. A user went viral when they uploaded the entirety of The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift in two-minute chunks over a 50-tweet thread.
As a result of the turbulent nature of Musk’s Twitter reign, agency groups Omnicom and IPG have also recently advised their clients to pause advertisements on the platform, declaring a loss of trust in the app. Omnicom alone works with the likes of McDonald’s, PepsiCo and Mercedez-Benz.
In light of this onslaught of negative news and the report that Musk’s Starlink just bought one of the largest ad packages available on Twitter, should brands and agencies completely remove themselves from the platform?
Can the app be trusted? Industry experts to share their opinions on the controversy.
Buddy Media director of organic social media, Laura Hartley
Hartley believes that Twitter has always had a reputation for being a “viper’s nest”, where individuals and brands can be called out or cancelled for sharing thoughts to a “snowballing online audience.”
“It’s a home of debate and some more… specialist topics,” she says.
While the social media director recognises that brands have “ached” for so long to be the next Innocent or Ryanair on the platform, Hartley feels that right now advertisers are “going to see it takes more than being funny to survive”.
“For those brands who have complicated or more governed products – and who are feeling nervous – then potentially now is the time to retire the account, without deleting the handle of course,” she adds.
“For those who want to embrace it, this is going to require greater validation and analysis of conversations, brand interactions and even sentiment to make sure they don’t fall for impersonators and their (quickly growing) viral content.”
RMK Marketing founder and lead social media marketing specialist, Rob Kearsey
Founder of RMK Marketing, Kearsey, maintains the slightly stronger view that brands should pull out of Twitter “for the time being”, as he believes the platform is “not a brand space environment at the moment”.
“You only have to look at what happened to Nintendo, with a fake account posting a picture of the iconic Mario character swearing, to see that,” he says.
As well as brand damage, Kearsey imagines that scammers are “having a field day”, tricking customers out of credit card details, personal information and more.
“There’s also the risks of outages, or the possibility that the platform could just collapse,” he adds.
“Ultimately, for brands it is best to come off Twitter for now and see where the platform is in a few months time. There are plenty of other social media channels where you can run activity and get good results.”
Social media marketing expert, Chris London
Social media marketing expert Chris London sides with Kearsey’s view, stating that Musk has made some “massive mistakes” and “ill-advised decisions” that has led to concern among advertisers about the “legitimacy” of the content on the social media app.
Though Musk has u-turned on the majority of his mistakes, London feels as if the “damage may already be done.”
“To quote a famous Warren Buffet quote: ‘It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it’,” he adds.
“Elon has even gone on to state some ‘dumb things’ will happen as he continues his transformation of the social media platform. Let’s hope these decisions aren’t as radical and reputation breaking.”
It seems the jury is still out on whether brands should pause or completely stop their marketing activity on the social media app.
Perhaps Elon Musk will tune into the controversy and criticisms and establish a more secure platform for advertisers? Or, perhaps more likely, will he continue to do as he pleases, creating his own unique definition of ‘free speech’ and wondering why users continue to desert the site in their thousands…
