Reality Check: Twitter and X are one and the same irrespective of how you feel about them

Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it to X in 2023. But almost two years later, it is still impossible to reference X in marketing circles without the obligatory qualifying parenthesis – formerly known as Twitter.

Out in the real world, it is not unusual for a rebrand to be met with resistance and even downright denial. Anyone who was a child in the UK in the 20th century knows deep down that Starburst are really Opal Fruits, and Snickers is a rather daft ‘new’ name for Marathon.

But, on the whole, marketers are usually fine with rebrands. After all, they are often responsible for making the business case for one in the first place. Media and tech, in particular, love a rebrand. Facebook is Meta, Google is Alphabet and marketers just get on with it. But somehow we can’t let Twitter go. Why is that?

Of course, much of it is down to all the bad stuff that people in our industry know is going on at X.

Since Musk’s takeover there has been a constant stream of recently departed employees publicly bemoaning the decline of the platform under its new leadership. Much of this has justifiably focused on the alarming cultural and political shift within the business. But the conversation is also bogged down with zero sum thinking and the reductionist tropes of the ‘culture wars’.

Only 4% of marketers believe X provides brand safetyTwitter is good. X is evil. The emotional wrench and cultural shock that marketers feel is evident in their longing for a mythical pre-Musk utopia of the Twitter town square – a brand safe, creative and cultural driving force. Meanwhile, over on their shiny new LinkedIn and Bluesky feeds, marketers are at the forefront of the campaign to extend the ‘X-odus’ to Tesla.

At Everyday People, we are in no doubt that Musk is a big problem for workers’ rights, for social justice, for democracy, well, for everything! And, when it comes to the brand ‘formerly known as Twitter’, there’s also little doubt that under Musk things have got worse. But anyone who used the platform pre-Musk will have become accustomed to the same ills (e.g. racism, misogyny, etc.) that blight the many dark corners of social media.

So, as with many things, there is a great deal of selective thinking in the story that marketers tell themselves about the brand ‘formerly known as Twitter’. And the story many in our industry are clinging to also reveals a big gap between what matters to marketers, and what matters to people out there in the real world.

Whose war is it anyway?

Everyday People is not the only research outfit in the business of reality checks. An extensive survey of public attitudes in ‘Culture Wars in the UK’ published by Ipsos and the Policy Institute at King’s College London concludes that ‘there has been a huge surge in media discussion of culture wars in the UK… but it is less clear that the public are engaged or are interested in the debate’.

We find the same pattern in our surveys exploring dominant worldviews in the marketing industry (e.g. The Empathy Delusion). Just like the media industry, marketing is populated by a highly educated and socially and economically privileged elite that constantly fall into the trap of assuming their values and concerns are shared by the population at large.

12 reasons why Twitter’s rebrand to X is a mistakeThe marketing story of the brand formerly known as Twitter is a microcosm of this phenomena. Deep cultural cleavages certainly exist across UK society. But ordinary people are not rushing to sign up for the front line in the ‘culture wars’. And that means most people are simply not looking to fight these battles on social media.

It’s not about trust or causes

Recent research by YouGov suggests that the general public have noticed the difference at X. A recent YouGov survey in the US reported that just 28% of US citizens trust Musk’s X – the same proportion that trust the US government.

Few reading this will be surprised that trust is in short supply across all walks of life. In principle, it is fair to say that most people would agree that being able to trust the government is a ‘good thing’ and an important ideal.

But when it comes to social media, does it really matter? Social media brands have been the outriders in our brave new postmodern, relativistic world. Every year marketers devote greater parts of their budget to social media. But being a funder or a user of most social media platforms means becoming inured to a post-truth, post-trust world.

Sure enough when do our Signal test on the main brands in the social media category, we find the stuff driving the ‘X-odus’ in marketing circles (i.e. trust and alignment with values and social causes, diversity of thought and open debate) just isn’t very salient out there in the real world.

Our Signal framework confirms that the main drivers of usage in the social media category are ‘connecting with people who share my opinions’ and ‘time I can spend alone’. No-one is really looking for the collectivism of the ‘town square’ it seems. Trust and values like universalism and self-direction are pretty far down in the pack too. And guess what? ‘Social’ media is seen as a primarily solitary pursuit focused on preserving and reinforcing our own hyper personalised/atomised view of ‘culture’.  Who knew?

And, of course, this is really why marketers can’t let Twitter go. Just like everyone else, we want to see the world as we know it played back to us on our platforms of choice.

The marketing industry workforce is not representative of the general population. It is biased heavily towards younger, university educated workers drawn from upper and middle class (AB) backgrounds.

The source of marketers’ Twitter story becomes clear when we look at how signal drivers for social media play out at the intersection of key demographics like age, education and class. The marketing industry views social media, as it does everything else, through the lens of youth. But, when we control for age, it is education and class privilege that really drive what people want from social media.

Trust and ‘contributing to causes I believe in’ are the top drivers for the young university educated AB’s (11% of the UK population) that tend to get jobs in marketing. But they are not priorities for social media users as a whole. And no one is looking for their views to be challenged, least of all the cohort where marketing continues to draw on for talent and cultural reference points.

Marketers hold on to a golden age of Twitter, driven by very different aspirations and values, while out in the real world people can’t tell the difference between Twitter and X!

Our data shows that Twitter and X’s brand signals are virtually identical amongst UK adults. At an overall level, both have fairly weak signals across all four dimensions of the framework and compared to its competitive set. The differences between the two are minor. Twitter is slightly more associated with being well known, which isn’t surprising given the longevity of the brand. While X signals slightly stronger on power and being financially successful – which is no doubt due to people’s perception of Musk.

Many marketers have a justifiable moral and political problem with Musk. But market orientation reveals a more objective commercial problem with the brand formerly known as Twitter.  There is nothing in the big blue box on these charts. It just isn’t strongly associated with the stuff that ordinary people tell us is important to them in the social media category. Removing spend from X, then, makes sense – but do it for the right business reasons rather than personal ones.