I am no longer active on Twitter, here's why
Twitter is facing its most severe crisis, one that can potentially decide its existence.
I just joined Threads. While it was easy to use, plus the ability to port over all past contacts from Instagram makes it all the more straightforward to start connecting with people, I find it no different from Twitter and Notes.
Between Twitter, Notes and Threads, I would rank Twitter to be the easiest to use. This is because I am a heavy user of the scheduler function, and of the three, only Twitter offers that function. I do not know why Notes don’t have that feature, especially given Substack has that built-in function to schedule posts.
Back in the days when Twitter and Substack were still good friends, I enjoyed using both platforms complementarily to one another. I would craft and publish my article on Substack and tweet and market them on Twitter. With the scheduler function on both platforms, I was able to schedule all my week’s worth of activities on the weekend and keep focused on my day job during the weekdays.
Good times don’t last. Twitter and Substack now hate each other, and their poor relationship has disrupted my writing strategy. While Substack has launched Notes as its own version of Twitter replacement, its reach was nowhere near Twitter. Twitter has a lot more users on its platform than Notes has, and its platform has better functions. It, therefore, makes perfect sense to leverage Twitter's large user base and advanced features to extend the reach of my Substack articles and, in the process, convert some of their users to become my subscribers on Substack.
During the good Twitter-Substack days, my articles view was climbing, and my subscribers count was also rocketing. Unfortunately, earlier this year, things took a sharp turn for the worse. Cross-sharing links were broken, and cross-platform posting no longer comes with that imagery appeal. As a result, stats dropped, and reach also dropped. To achieve the same outcome as before, I now have to work doubly hard.
The whole episode made me re-evaluate the whole Twitter-Substack strategy and whether it still makes sense to invest the effort to grow Twitter to complement my Substack growth. Somehow the answer wasn’t conclusive, and there were many uncertainties, especially with the rebranding. Is Twitter still the Twitter we know? Is it still worth the effort? My hunch says no, but I also don’t have a strong vision to suggest otherwise. So, I adopted a wait-and-see attitude instead.
After the recent launch of Threads and seeing how quickly it had gained popularity among writers and Instagrammers, I thought this could be it. This was why I decided to download Threads to examine its compatibility with Substack and my usage requirement. It was rather disappointing. It has limited function, plus it lacks a desktop version. These requirements are important to a writer who work mostly off the computer. Without which, it would be rather crippling.
While Threads is limited in function, this is not to say it is not a threat to Twitter. In the short time since its recent launch, Threads has already garnered more than 100 million users signup. This is an app to be reckoned with. Twitter is facing its most severe crisis, one that can potentially decide its existence. While the final outcome is yet unknown, my bet is even if it survives the fierce competition, its market share will no longer be like before. Twitter, in my mind, has an identity crisis and is on a severe decline.
What about you? Are you still using Twitter?
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