What Happened?
On July 24, 2023, Elon Musk announced that Twitter will officially be renamed “X." Although the name change is effective immediately, the visual identity of this shift will take some time to be fully reflected in the web experience and app, with the web experience already seeing changes such as updated logos.
While this rebranding may seem sudden, it has been part of Elon Musk’s vision and a slow progression since he purchased the company last year.
- OCTOBER 28, 2022: Elon Musk purchased Twitter for the price of $44 billion dollars
- APRIL 4, 2023: Twitter Inc. merged into X Corp. and thus Twitter Inc. no longer exists
- JULY 24, 2023: Twitter rebrands to “X”
The purpose of this rebrand is to bring Musk one step closer to his version of an “everything app” as he tweeted in October of last year. There haven't been any changes to the advertising model on the platform, but what remains to be seen is how this newest major platform change will impact user behavior, and even recognition knowing the huge awareness brand Twitter had built around the world.
With the rebrand announcement, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, tweeted details about what’s to come:
Code3's POV
There have been no shortage of changes to Twitter throughout the past year, and we expect more changes to continue under the new brand “X." Two notable recent developments include incentives on certain ad formats, and a new ad spend requirement for brands to keep their gold checkmarks ($6K in previous 180 days or $1K in previous 30 days). With this turmoil, eMarketer predicts the platform will lose 3.6M users in 2023, -6.3% YoY but from a user and advertiser flow perspective, there have been no significant changes at this point.
We still believe X has a role to play in the paid social space, particularly for specific audiences, timely events, releases or holidays. As long as users remain engaged on the platform, which seems to be the case, brands can find opportunity on the platform.
Twitter's Official Response
“X is a major milestone towards our vision for what the future of social media looks like. A future state of unlimited interactivity - centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking - creating a global marketplace all powered by AI.
Our community has pushed us to dream bigger, to innovate faster, to command the space we occupied. A few key highlights of how X evolved over the last eight months:
- Long-form publishing is raising the breadth and depth of quality content for users, and powering the writing community.
- Our video offering has become far more immersive, with vertical video ads and long form.
- Creators - the lifeblood of social - can now make a living on X.
- Our advertisers have a new standard of brand adjacency protections, with more to come.
The advertising community should be excited by today’s announcement, and stands to be one of the greatest benefactors.”
